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That this House has considered improving the education system after the covid-19 outbreak.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Rees. I understand it is your first chairmanship, so many congratulations if that is the case. I thank Members, and most of all the Minister, for taking time to participate in the debate. Frankly, all debates on education are important. I pay tribute to the work that the Minister has done. He is a long-standing Minister and is much respected in his field.
I will start off with a couple of other thank yous that are relevant to the Isle of Wight. I know how hard the headteachers, teachers and pupils on the Island have worked, and I thank them all. It has been a difficult year and I think the Isle of Wight has done pretty well overall, especially compared with the national average. It has not been easy and we are grateful to everyone for the efforts that they have made. I thank our education team at the council: Brian Pope and Steve Crocker, and Councillor Paul Brading. I thank them for their dedication to the wellbeing of the island.
One of the worst of many damaging aspects of covid has been the effect on the education of children and young people. Even with our best efforts, it will now take years to repair the damage. Significant events such as pandemics and, indeed, world wars, often serve as disruptors, but they can be positive disruptors. Not only do we now have an opportunity to learn from the past year with its virtual as opposed to real, in-person education, but such situations provide a window of opportunity for sometimes radical change. I want to look at two or three ideas to suggest potential changes to the education system that could benefit not only folk on the Isle of Wight but everyone in the UK.
As I said, the pandemic is no different from significant disruptor episodes, and has identified some important issues such as, in the healthcare context, the link between the health and care home sectors—or lack of it—and how that worked during the pandemic. I want to take this opportunity to ask some big questions about how things can be done differently in education. The Minister has been in his post for some years so I am trying to frame the debate as questions to him, because he has significantly more expertise than I do in the matter. There are three things I want to look at, and the first is term time. The Secretary of State has spoken about that recently. The second is the use of technology to improve education, and the third is Government working in a more integrated and coherent way. I shall refer to my constituency too.
I intend to call the Opposition spokesperson at 5.33 pm and the Minister at 5.38 pm. That gives four minutes maximum to Back-Bench speakers, so please confine yourselves to four minutes or less. I call Emma Hardy.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Rees. Provision and support for children with special educational needs and disability was broken before the pandemic. During the pandemic, those children have been forgotten. My plea to the Minister is, now that we are looking at how to improve education, let us put those children back at its heart.
The Select Committee on Education report of October 2019 took 18 months, heard more than 70 witnesses and received 700 pieces of written evidence. To quote from the document, these were the problems found pre-pandemic:
“There is too much tension between a child’s needs and the provision available…a general lack of accountability within the system…Parents and carers have to wade through a treacle of bureaucracy, full of conflict, missed appointments and despair…many local authorities are struggling with the reforms, and in some cases this has led to unlawful practice…struggling against the tide of unintended consequences of policy decisions.”
The report states:
“This generation is being let down—the reforms have not done enough to join the dots, to bring people together and to create opportunities for all young people to thrive in adulthood.”
It adds:
“We are seeing serious gaps in therapy provision.”
The summary concludes by saying:
“Special educational needs and disabilities must be seen as part of the whole approach of the Department’s remit, not just an add-on.”
During the pandemic, they have not even been an add-on; they have been an afterthought.
The Government’s response to the report was to commission their own review, which they promised would be published in January 2021. After I submitted a written question to the Department, I was told that it would be published in spring 2021. I hope the Minister will be able to tell us when we can expect to see that document.
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight (Bob Seely) on securing this timely debate. I will concentrate, in the time I have, on two things. On the face of it, they are quite different, but I believe that they are related and speak to two of the major challenges that we face in education post pandemic.
We have long known it to be the case, although the pandemic has emphasised it, that education is about not only those tangible outputs such as exams but the whole self and preparing young people for the world. It is often measured in the absence of things that only become tangible when they go wrong. We are seeing the fruit of that dropping from the tree now—lost learning, and young people with deep mental health concerns, issues with socialising and increasing anxiety. For some, perhaps even many, being away from formalised school during the crisis has left deep scars that we really need to address right now.
The pandemic has taught us some lessons about ourselves too. In my constituency, we suffered disproportionately poor outcomes from covid due to underlying health conditions. We have also seen young people becoming even more reliant on devices and social media for schooling and for their friendships. We have to ask ourselves how we can learn from these things and how we can change them for the better. I do not for a second believe that we can put the genie back in the bottle on using the internet, and nor should we ever want to, but we can challenge ourselves to ensure that this fantastic tool is used better. Similarly, we can re-emphasise the importance of outdoor education and start to head off now some of those issues that will impact young people later in life.
To touch on online skills and political literacy, we are at a time when, like it or lump it, politics is everywhere— politicians have made a disproportionate number of decisions about how people live their lives, earn a living and how they learn—so interest and frustration with politics is at an all-time high, but are we equipping young people with the skills they need to engage and to see the wood for the trees? In 2018, the National Literacy Foundation found that only 2% of children in the UK have the skills needed to determine whether a piece of information is real or fake. If the last year has shown us anything, it is that misinformation and low levels of media literacy pose serious threats to societies across the globe. It has been common to speak of a crisis in democracy for years, but in the past 12 months it has been brought into sharp focus. Our education system is at risk of being out of date. We must ensure that resources are there to prepare students for life in a 21st-century democracy. The covid-19 pandemic has brought challenges that most of us could not imagine over a year ago, and the education system and teachers have been hit incredibly hard, but they have more than risen to these challenges. Even with that adversity comes an opportunity—an opportunity to have some conversations like this debate, and to open up about how we can improve and what rebuilding looks like.
The covid pandemic has taught us to revalue many things that we simply took for granted. Top of that list is the importance of teaching and learning, especially the value of quality teaching. The pandemic has also shone a bright light on the high levels of inequality that exist in our country. The pandemic has made them worse. There is a lot we can do to make our education system fairer for young people and mature students alike. The lessons we are learning from the pandemic can be a driver for real positive change.
We talk about schools and universities, but all too often we leave out the further education sector. Yet it is the worst-funded sector in the education system. It is also at the heart of addressing the hard-wired inequalities in this country. At the end of last year, the Government announced that colleges and sixth forms would benefit from an extra £400 million investment, and that funding would be maintained in real terms for 2021-22. That was welcome and long overdue, but not nearly enough to fill the £1.1 billion funding gap that has opened up for 16 to 19-year-olds since 2010. As funding is based on previous student numbers, an increase in students could still result in a fall in funding per student in real terms.
For adult learners, funding is yet more unpredictable. Total spending on adult skills has fallen by about 45% in the last decade. As our economy and workforce prepare to adapt to the new challenges after the pandemic, there is no better time to talk about the vital role of further education. The CBI predicts that nine in 10 employees will have to reskill by 2030. Investing in reskilling our adult workforce is financially clever and imperative for individual and collective wellbeing. Our further education colleges are at the forefront of those efforts.
In Bath, we are lucky that Bath College has formed a partnership with Bath Spa University and the Institute of Coding to create a groundbreaking plan to reskill and upskill our local workforce. The project is called I-START and it delivers across innovation, technology, arts, research and teaching in flexible blended modules that fit easily around busy lives. At the core of the project is supporting learners to build and develop skills in resilience, problem solving, creativity and communication, which will be much sought after by businesses after covid. I hope this unique initiative starting in Bath will serve as an inspiration and a useful model for other parts of the country.
Having met secondary heads in northern Devon last week, they clearly articulated how they see this as a watershed moment for education, and a chance we should not miss to revisit how the education system works and the outcomes it delivers for our young people. I was a newly qualified maths teacher just before my election in 2019, so I speak with some insight into what is going on in our schools in northern Devon. I take the opportunity to thank everyone who works in them, and for everything they have done throughout the pandemic. I also thank all the parents who have been home-educating, which will have ensured this generation of schoolchildren have learnt many more life skills than perhaps previous generations, given the very difficult year we have all endured.
Northern Devon consists of my constituency of North Devon and neighbouring Torridge. As the head of the school where I taught described it, it is located at the top of the country’s longest cul-de-sac. The area is remote, rural and coastal and presents unique challenges that, to date, have not been reflected in education policies, nationally or regionally.
For me, levelling up starts with education and skills. One measure that highlights that there is work to be done in northern Devon is the social mobility index. Of the 324 local authority district areas, in the south of Devon, South Hams is ranked at 49 and Exeter 81, yet my constituency ranks 238th and Torridge is at 283. The pandemic has shown how our schools deliver much more than just the three Rs to our young people and their families. Our headteachers talk of a holistic egality strategy for North Devon and Torridge that comprises education, special educational needs, social services and child support. The headteachers are uniquely placed to feed into that long-overdue strategy, and also to manage the resources that they need to deliver it within northern Devon, more specifically than just Devon.
One year on from the first lockdown marks an entire year since schools first closed, so perhaps it is time for the Department for Education’s performance review. We could reflect on the exam results fiasco or the free school meals U-turns, or even the utterly irresponsible decision to allow schools to open for just 24 hours in January, enabling the post-Christmas virus to circulate far and wide, driving up infection rates. However, I will instead focus on the remote education support scheme, which will be of vital importance for the topic of today’s debate —improving the education system after the pandemic.
After the uncertainty of the opening months it quickly became clear that the pandemic would have a long-term impact on education, and that connectivity would be vital to continue learning. So, back in June, MPs, charities, unions, past Education Secretaries and even a former Prime Minister all joined me in writing to the Secretary of State to call on his Department to ensure that no child would be left behind because they could not access the internet or a device at home.
Ten months on, this week’s results in the National Audit Office report are damning. The Department did not even aim to provide equipment to all children who lacked it. How does the Minister think that children on the wrong side of the digital divide have been able to log in and learn from home? The answer is simple: they have not. Every click has widened the attainment gap. The Government pledged 1.3 million devices, without connectivity, but there are still 300,000 missing. Where are they?
It is now March 2021 and I am still driving around Mitcham and Morden, dropping donated devices to my local schools. Although I am very grateful to all the individuals and organisations who are donating devices, stepping in where the Government have failed, there is still far to go. St Mark’s Academy needs 303 devices, Harris Academy Morden needs 100, William Morris Primary School needs 50, Stanford Primary School needs 15, Liberty Primary School needs 50 and St Teresa’s RC Primary School needs 52.
I will start my remarks by focusing upon the plight of our outdoor education centres. I am deeply concerned about them. We know that of the 15,000 people who worked in the sector at the beginning of the pandemic, 6,000 have already lost their jobs, and there will be many more who are freelance workers and who have not been taken on again for the seasons that have been missed.
There has been a complete drying-up of the market for these outdoor education centres and of course there is no direct bespoke financial package for them either. We should remember that in Scotland and Northern Ireland there has been a specific financial package to help outdoor education centres. The fact that there has not been one in England is a reason why we are losing thousands of staff and beginning to see the closure of such centres.
On 22 February, which is now more than a month ago, the Prime Minister read out his road map for the unlocking of the country. Lots of things are on that road map—an opening date for nightclubs was on it. That is very good; I am glad it is there. However, there was nothing for outdoor education centres. If, as I do, the Minister speaks to the heads and teachers of primary and secondary schools, he will discover that those heads and teachers throughout primary and secondary education are desperate to be able to confirm, or indeed to book, day sessions and residential sessions at our outdoor education centres, many dozens of which are in Cumbria, especially in my constituency. So, I ask the Minister this: why have he and the Government not added outdoor education centres and their reopening to that road map?
Will the Minister today do three things? First, will he announce the road map for the reopening of outdoor education centres? Secondly, will he provide a bespoke financial package to keep our outdoor education centres going and the outdoor education industry’s head above water, as Scotland and Northern Ireland have done? Thirdly, will he do something truly radical and positive, which is to deploy the talent within our outdoor education centres within schools, to help reconnect our young people with a love of learning, building up the confidence they may have lost during the pandemic and connecting them to education again? Outdoor education centres contain people with exactly the set of skills that we need at this time; the tragedy is that that is exactly the time when this Government are allowing those skills to wither on the vine.
It is a pleasure to speak in this debate. I thank the hon. Member for Isle of Wight (Bob Seely) for setting the scene so very well —we appreciate that. It is good to see the Minister in his place. I think he has always been there—at least it seems like it. That is not a bad thing, by the way. We very much look forward to his response.
Obviously, education is a devolved matter in Northern Ireland, so the Minister does not have any responsibility for it, but I wanted to feed in to this debate and give the perspective of what it is like in Northern Ireland. I know that what we have experienced in Northern Ireland is the same as what other hon. Members have experienced across the whole of the United Kingdom.
I have had many fears for our children during the outbreak. I think education probably features fairly high on the constituency problems page. I have fears for children’s paths of learning, fears for those who have not been able to learn online, fears for their mental health, fears for their social skills—so many fears. The question is: what will we in this House do to support them through those fears?
Today’s papers, which I read on the way over—the local and provincial press—were full of photographs of the Education Minister back home meeting some pupils in schools. There were also pictures of the pupils with absolutely glorious smiles. In some cases, they had ice-creams—I am not quite sure if it was 9 o’clock in the morning. The teachers, principals and classroom assistants were all responding very positively, and the hugs that they were giving the children told the story.
We have seen that online learning has a role, but there is nothing that beats physical presence in schools. I have spoken to GCSE teachers recently, and they are very concerned that many children will not go on camera, and they do not know whether they understand the work. They have said that there is nothing like walking around the room to see the children working through, and checking for understanding. That underlines my view that we can incorporate more online, but we cannot and must not imagine that it can replace what teachers are gifted at doing. Teachers get to know their pupils and what works for them. The personal, face-to-face contact really motivates the child individually whenever they are falling behind.
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The three-term school year has absolutely had its day. We have not lived in an agrarian society for the best part of 150 years, if not 200 years. Children, teenagers and young people no longer need to go and help with the harvests for a six or seven-week period over the summer. That has not had to happen for decades, if not a century or two. We know that long holidays can damage kids’ learning. I remember going back to school in September pretty much having forgotten everything that I learned the previous year, because in the seven weeks over summer people simply switch off. Research shows that the poorer the children, the worse the damage. Additionally, poorer children are less likely to take part in enriching activities in summer, such as travel abroad, and they are sadly more likely to be malnourished and are more vulnerable to isolation and periods of inactivity. This is a social and mental health problem, as well as an educational problem.
The Secretary of State said that we should look to move to a five-term year, and I completely agree. We should be doing so permanently, and perhaps a royal commission could look at whether it is a four-term or five-term year. We need to split up the term time in order to have shorter but more consistent terms throughout the year. Yes, we still need summer holidays, but they can be staggered depending on the exact school term for any academy or county, with changes in term time. Holidays do not have to be crammed into six or seven weeks in summer; they could be taken in June, July, August or September, depending on when the exact term time falls for any given school.
Why do we have a school year that runs from September to July? Why not from January to December? Why should we have exams in summer, which is full of disruption? Summer is fun—people want to be outside, and it is a very distracting time of year. Why not have exams in March or April, over a winter period in which it is easier to encourage kids to work at home and to study because it is raining outside or it is cold? There is an argument that if we think it is right to do something, let us get on and do it.
My second point is about using technology to improve education. We need to implement the best learnings that we can to enhance education, and I thank the Academies Enterprise Trust, Julian Drinkall and his team for their excellent work at Ryde Academy—some really ground-breaking stuff. Although some schools have struggled with virtual learning, most have not. The Isle of Wight has done very well by comparison and, again, I thank everyone involved, but we need to take the lessons from the pandemic and find the best balance between in-person teaching and virtual learning, because kids need to learn to react with screens as well as in person. I know there is an issue with people saying that sometimes children are watching too much TV at home, but screens can be a great way to encourage engagement with technology at school. Everyone will be living virtually online and in person now, and this is not an option.
Every child should have a tablet or laptop for the duration of their schooling, in the same way that they would have had a pencil and notebook 50 years ago. Certainly when it comes to exams and testing, screens can be almost a non-stressful way to encourage testing at the end of a lesson, at the end of the day or at the end of a week. Testing can become part of the support for children, and indeed for teachers, rather than painful occasional hurdles that need to be overcome. For some children, virtual learning has enhanced their education. For some, it has not worked, and vulnerable children need to be in the classroom, either with in-person teaching or with tablets. For some kids, however—as far as the teachers to whom I have spoken say—more at-home learning has actually been of real benefit, as has been more interaction with technologists. For example, I understand that some children with autism have benefited from being able to work at home with a more flexible timetable. This is about an important duty of care as well as education.
That links to the critical national infrastructure that we actually need, which is not a railway between London and Birmingham; it is fibre to premises for homes, schools and businesses throughout the country. That is the critical piece of infrastructure that we cannot do without in future, and that we should prioritise.
My third point is about coherent and integrated working. Talking to educational experts—I like to talk to them anyway, but I wanted to make sure that I had some valid points to make in my speech—there is a sense from some of them, and from some teachers, that although the Department for Education is doing excellent work, it could work more effectively and coherently with the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy on skills, and with the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport on kit and support for schools in a virtual world, in order to improve education and work experience. I am sure the Minister will let us know his thoughts on this issue.
Finally, I want to talk a bit about improving education on the Isle of Wight. We have an improving school system on the Island, for which I am very grateful. The officers we have had from Hampshire, who now work on the Island, have helped us drive up standards.
We have had an issue with higher education, only because we have not had it and not had enough of it. My huge frustration has been that for 30 years, while higher education in Bournemouth, Portsmouth, Southampton and Brighton has driven not only education in those cities but student life and the prosperity it brings to those city centres, that education revolution has completely passed by the Isle of Wight, which is painful for us.
The worst thing is that, if someone is young and smart and wants to get a degree, they would pretty much have to leave the Island. That inability to keep our most talented people has been a problem for us. Once kids leave, they might not come back until they are 50, 60 or 70. They might come back to retire, but getting them back has been a problem. I would very much like to do more to develop higher education, specifically with a higher education campus in Newport.
We have the Isle of Wight College, under the excellent leadership of Debbie Lavin. Anything the Minister could do, not only with the DFE but also the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, working with me to develop more degree-level courses, which people can take on the Island, perhaps doing that through the Isle of Wight College or virtually, or with other people setting up a campus here, would be incredibly valuable for us.
I want others to have time to talk, so I will wrap up there. I will be grateful to hear what the Minister has to say to those critical points. To sum up: on term times, can we change the school year and potentially the times we do exams, to enable kids to learn better and more consistently throughout the year? Can we use technology better, with that interaction between the best of in-person learning and learning virtually on screen? We need that for the future, because kids will need to be able to adjust to the real life that they are going to find once they leave school. Thirdly, what can the DFE do to work more coherently with other Departments, to ensure that we drive forward a skills and learning agenda, which is critical for the future of the country?
That report led me to set up the all-party parliamentary group for special educational needs and disabilities, now chaired by my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Olivia Blake), which is looking particularly at the impact of covid on these children. The situation during covid has got worse for these families, with many families pushed to breaking point, because the children have been an afterthought. As the Government and the Minister were promoting the use of technology and laptops for school pupils, no thought was given to assistive technology for our pupils with special educational needs and disabilities.
Although all those children were allowed to attend school, because they had their education, health and care plans, little thought was given to what would happen when more than 90% of children in a special school attend at the same time; or to when we introduce a policy saying that these children have to be tested, knowing that some of them have serious sensory conditions and cannot administer the tests themselves, leading to many parents feeling extremely worried about the idea of a teacher having to forcibly test their child. That left headteachers in the impossible situation of wondering what to do if all the children decided that they could not take the test because they find it too distressing. Again, the children were an afterthought. No thought was given, either, to the staff working in these special schools, who need to be prioritised for vaccination to keep these pupils safe.
Families have been desperately worried. I am so worried about, and hope the Minister will look into, the number of parents of children with special educational needs and disabilities who have started home schooling and who now inform me that they have no intention of sending their children back to school when the risks of the pandemic have eased. It is not only the parents and the children, but the special educational needs co-ordinators, three quarters of whom say they are experiencing challenges in providing support for children and young people with EHCPs during lockdown. Any question or debate about improving the education system after covid-19 has to put these children back at the heart of the conversation, because a system that delivers for these children is a system that can deliver for all. I still believe that every child matters.
Outdoor education is one subject that we should be focusing on. In Cumbria, we are blessed with many excellent centres and I have greatly enjoyed visits to a few of them recently, such as Kepplewray. However, that sector is on its knees. Outdoor education is not just about exercise or getting outdoors. It is about teaching valuable life skills, such as teamwork, resilience and communication. It is already a vital part of the British education system, but without it schools, children and communities will permanently lose important formulative educational experiences.
If we are genuinely looking—to coin a phrase—to build back to a better education system after this pandemic, we cannot only look to protect this sector but must utilise it more and head off some of those underlying issues that I mentioned before. We owe it to the next generation to equip them with the tools they need to navigate the world around them, whether that is online or outdoors. The pandemic provides an opportunity; I really hope the Minister and his team will seize that opportunity.
As we look into education and building back better, I very much hope that the next generation will be inspired by the work delivered by our world-leading scientists in developing treatments and vaccines for covid-19. I know that, locally to me in North Devon, the children at the primary school in Tawstock are keen to become broadband engineers after seeing at first hand how Openreach connects their school and having had the chance to splice fibres and better understand how fibre broadband works and is delivered.
For our levelling-up agenda to be realised we need to better integrate schools with local employers, and embed at a far younger age what it means to be an engineer or a scientist. This might at last be my opportunity to inspire more youngsters to pass their maths GCSE, as a ticket to achieving an exciting career near home in lovely North Devon.
We also need to devise policies that are effective in remote rural locations and use the expertise of the teaching profession in those locations to really build back better. I very much look forward to working with the Minister and the team of fantastic heads in northern Devon to begin to move the agenda forward.
Before the pandemic, children on free school meals were leaving school 18 months behind other children and the gap was getting worse. How far behind will those on the wrong side of the digital divide have fallen now? This is no problem for the past; we are now well and truly a digital society and there is no going back. The focus has to be on how these children will catch up, and closing the digital divide is an imperative first step.
So, will the Minister do those three things? Will he also pay tribute to the teachers who have made such an outstanding contribution in every part of education over the last 12 months? Many people are reflecting—indeed, we all are—that 12 months has passed since the start of this pandemic. It is right to pay tribute to so many different people who have been public servants throughout that time, but it is also right to focus in particular today on the service provided by our teachers.
Thinking about what teachers did at the drop of a hat last March—teach remotely from scratch—we see that, throughout the time since, they have cared for the vulnerable and the most needy, very often providing food for them directly out of their own pockets. We have also seen how, at short notice, they provided ways of ensuring that assessments were made when exams were cancelled; we have seen how they went through their school holidays without taking any break whatsoever, in order to get ready for new arrangements, such as covid testing; and we have seen how schools have reopened again, and how they have done so seamlessly and with attendance maintained at such a high level. Teachers have ensured that our young people get the best possible education, in school if they are the children of key workers, and at home by remote teaching.
Teachers’ performance has been outstanding; they are national treasures. On behalf of every parent in my constituency—indeed, I think every parent in the country—I pay tribute to every single one of them.
I am given to understand that parents have been given access to teaching staff during the pandemic, allowing greater communication. It has been wonderful to build up relationships. That, I believe, should continue when we get out of the pandemic, but with appropriate guidelines that allow teachers to have their evenings off without being bombarded. All staff in every job, when they finish their day’s work, should have a balance with their home life. There is pressure on pupils, teachers and classroom assistants.
The lessons that we can learn are clear: there is a role for technology and for face-to-face, and there is also a place for greater home-school co-operation. In all this, there is a need for real investment in our education system to ensure that children have access to technology, and that parents are aware of what is happening in their children’s lives. I understand that some parents may not have as big a role in their child’s life, but they need to do that.
I again thank the teaching staff, the pupils, the teachers, the classroom assistants, and everyone in schools who went above and beyond, and who have sourced technology and contacted parents with concerns above and beyond their hours. We are determined to do all we can to get our children back to where they should be, with no one left behind.