Neil O'Brien
MP for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston · Conservative · United Kingdom
“Following is the full text of the petition: [ The petition of residents of the constituency of Harborough, Oadby & Wigston, Declares that the petitioners oppose any proposal to extend the boundaries of Leicester City Council in a manner that would incorporate the communities of Great Glen, Wistow, Newton Harcourt and Little Stretton into…”
“In the Government’s own consultation about the expansion of Leicester, nine out of 10 people said that they were against it. Now, with millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money wasted so far, Ministers are having to do a complete reworking of this whole chaotic, undemocratic process, amid accusations of gerrymandering.”
“The petition states: “The petitioners therefore request that the House of Commons urges the Government to halt and reconsider any proposals for the expansion of Leicester City Council's boundaries, and to ensure that the views of local residents are fully considered before any changes are implemented, thereby protecting the character, ide…”
“The petitioners therefore request that the House of Commons urges the Government to halt and reconsider any proposals for the expansion of Leicester City Council's boundaries, and to ensure that the views of local residents are fully considered before any changes are implemented, thereby protecting the character, identity and independence…”
“In the Government’s own consultation on whether to expand Leicester, nine out of 10 people said no. Tens of thousands of people signed petitions against it, yet until Ministers hit this legal snag they tried to press on anyway.”
“Eleven thousand people in Oadby, Wigston and Great Glen recently voted in a referendum against joining the city of Leicester. Ministers know that people do not want this locally, and yet they are forcing it on them anyway.”
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“There are two big questions about this plan. To say the least, there is a clear tension between these two money-saving ideas. If the Government take away EHCPs in mainstream schools, parents will be a lot less confident when the council presses them to put their child into a mainstream school rather than a special one. Given that the Government have U-turned on the winter fuel payment and now say that the coming welfare vote will, in fact, be a confidence vote in the Prime Minister, it will be interesting to see what eventually issues forth from the DFE. We know from these estimates and the SR that, as Sir Jon Cole says, unless the Government deliver these large, planned savings in special needs, the settlement for schools will become increasingly difficult. This Government have broken a staggering number of promises incredibly quickly.”
“The SEND plan will be out this autumn—coincidentally around the time of what looks like an increasingly difficult Budget. So far, DFE Ministers have floated two ideas for the SEND review. The first is to restrict EHCPs only to special schools. That would be a huge change. There are 271,000 children with EHCPs in non-special state schools and a further 37,800 in non-special independent schools, so 60% of the total are not in special schools. Anna Bird, chair of the Disabled Children’s Partnership—a coalition of 120 charities—has said: “The idea of scrapping Education, Health and Care Plans will terrify families.” Secondly, on top of that, we learned from a Minister of State in the Department of Health and Social Care that the Government also plan to push a lot more children from special schools into the mainstream.”
“If, as Schools Week are reporting, the £760 million ‘SEND transformation fund’ is coming out of the core schools budget, then that represents a significant real terms funding cut in school funding.” Perhaps the Minister will tell us whether that is correct and it is coming out of core schools spending. That brings me on to the great suppressed premises in these estimates, which is that DFE assumes that it will save substantial amounts on special needs compared with the trend implied by previous years. The hon. Member for Yeovil (Adam Dance) talked about the cuts to special needs spending. In fact, since 2016, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, spending has increased by £4 billion in real terms—a 60% increase. If that has felt like a cut to the hon. Member, he will not like what is being brewed up by the Treasury now.”
“He says that “education will—for the first time in a spending review—get less growth than the average across all spending departments… The last time we had such a poor three-year cash settlement was the period 2014-2018, when average cash increases were about 1.8 per cent. But then, inflation averaged 1.5 per cent… it slightly sticks in the throat that HMT are trying to present it as good news… The claim that this is a ‘£2 billion increase in real terms’ is a version of spin I can’t remember seeing before. It relies on treating the financial year before last (pre-election) as the first year of the current spending review period.” In fact, he says that when all that is stripped away, “to all intents and purposes, this is a flat real-terms settlement for three years.”
“The Early Years Alliance has said that it is “disappointed” and “frustrated” by the spending review, and the Early Education and Childcare Coalition says that the spending review “reiterates many promises already made” and that “many nurseries and other providers are…running at losses and at brink of closure”. Meanwhile, the Institute for Fiscal Studies notes that the funding in the spending review for early years “may not be enough to meet additional unexpected demand”. So what does this all look like when we come down from the billions to look at it from the frontline? Sir Jon Coles is the leader of the largest school trust in the country and also a distinguished former senior official in DFE. What does he make of these estimates and this SR?”
“It will mean that, in 2027, fees will go above £10,000 a year for the first time. It will mean that the total amount borrowed per student taking out the full amount will increase from £59,000 now to £66,000 outside London, and from £69,000 to £77,000 in London. So much for paying less! Ironically, the gain to universities from that broken promise and from that fee hike has been entirely wiped out by yet another broken promise: the decision to increase national insurance, another thing that Labour promised not to do. That broken promise has also hit nurseries.”
“Perhaps the Minister will tell us the answer. The Prime Minister promised two weeks of work experience for all pupils and the Labour manifesto promised £85 million to pay for it. In May the Government told schools to get on and deliver extra work experience. When exactly will schools receive that £85 million? Schools are not the only bit of the Department for Education where the Government have broken promises. The Secretary of State’s website still says, in a chirpy way: “Graduates, you will pay less under a Labour government.” But Labour has increased fees, not reduced them. The spending review was strangely silent on the subject of tuition fees. I assume that silence can only imply that tuition fees are set to rise in every year of this Parliament. Let me say what that will mean.”
“I am glad that the hon. Member has prompted me—he must have a copy of my speech. In the last Parliament, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, real-terms spending per pupil went up by 11%. I thank him for allowing me to make that point. So why are so many teachers getting the sack? It is partly because that is not the only broken promise. Labour also promised that it would fully compensate schools for the cost of the national insurance increase. The Minister sighs as I say this, and schools around the country will sigh too, because Labour broke that promise. According to the Confederation of Schools Trusts and the Association of School and College Leaders, schools have been left up to 35% short in some cases. With all the broken promises that we have already mentioned, let me check in on another promise.”
“I apologise to the Minister and officials if the letter was sent, but got lost in the post somewhere. It is an interesting question. I hope the Minister will agree to write on that point and look into the question.”
“What is really left over once the authorities have spent all this money on things that we compel them to spend it on? I encourage the Minister to get that answered, not just for my benefit but for hers, so that she can understand what is really being devolved or not, and whether we can do something to give the combined authorities a greater margin for flexibility. The Government say that they are in favour of devolution—that is in line with their industrial strategy, which they are saying more about today—so that members of the combined authorities are able to fit local skills spending to their local needs. However, that is only freedom if there is some genuinely free money in the system, and it is not clear that there is that much. I therefore encourage the Minister to agree to write to me.”
“A lot of people in combined authorities say to me, “It’s all very well saying that you’ve devolved adult skills spending, but in practice, when the money arrives”—and it is now 6% less—“the great majority of it is taken up by spending on statutory entitlements that we don’t have any control over.” They are not complaining about the statutory entitlements; they are merely making the point that devolution in this area is not necessarily what it sounds like when Ministers announce it. That is a fair point, which applied equally to us when we were in government as it does to the current Government. I press the Minister again to agree to write to me, to tell me: what proportion of spending of the adult skills budget in combined authorities is not taken up by statutory entitlement? What is the real devolution here?”
“I asked this question of the Minister for children, families and wellbeing, the hon. Member for Lewisham East (Janet Daby), in April, when we debated regulations on the devolution of adult skills spending to Cornwall and North Yorkshire. I asked her to write to me, and she agreed that she would write on this particular point, but I am afraid no letter was ever forthcoming. I wondered whether I could have another go with DFE colleagues.”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stuart. I will not detain the Committee for long, because this is a technical piece of legislation simply updating regulations to reflect new qualifications and, in a sense, maintaining the principle that we established during our time in government of devolving the adult skills budget, but I want to make one point and press the Minister on one issue. The point I want to make is that although the Government were critical of us for cuts to the adult skills budget when we were in office, they have now themselves cut the adult skills budget by 6% in recent months. I mention that not to make a political point—although that is something that Labour Members criticised us for doing when they were in opposition, but they have now done themselves in government—but, in part, to frame a question.”
“Thank you, Mr Speaker. Although they did not mention it before the election, Labour is committed to abolishing every district and borough council in Leicestershire. It has also invited proposals to expand the city’s boundaries, and the Mayor of Leicester has put forward such a proposal. This is universally not wanted in Oadby, Wigston, Great Glen and the surrounding villages—in fact, thousands of people have signed a petition against it—so can we please at least have a debate in Government time on that proposal? Will the Leader of the House encourage the Local Government Minister not to allow this expansion of the city? It is not just the higher council tax; people want to keep their local identity. If the Government are going to go ahead with the proposal, will they at least allow people to vote in a referendum?”
“Members might think that since my constituency is as far away from the sea as it could be, the main risk is normally people with metal detectors fishing in the canal and constantly fishing out hand grenades, but water safety is relevant everywhere. Just at Christmas a one-year-old girl was rescued from the River Welland. This has been an important debate. We welcome the Government’s decision to look carefully at what can be done to build on the existing statutory guidance and update it. We have heard excellent contributions from Members on both sides of the House, and I look forward to the Minister’s comments.”
“We have heard from a number of Members about important local and individual campaigns that can be so powerful, and I pay tribute to all the people involved in those. I was involved in using the sugar tax to create and then expand the PE and sport premium, which has provided more funding for PE lessons in schools. In 2017, we doubled the funding that primary schools received to improve the quality of their PE and sport provision, including water education—it went up from £160 million to £320 million. However, there is still much more to be done, because about a third of adults—about 14 million people—still cannot swim. I must pay tribute to the hon. Member for Ribble Valley (Maya Ellis) for leading by example and learning to swim as an adult—good on her for doing that. All of us are affected by these hugely important issues.”
“As has already been mentioned, it was the previous Government who updated the national curriculum in 2013 to add swimming and water safety education. It is surprising that it was so late. That was where we got this rule that pupils should be taught to swim at least 25 metres. A few people have talked about facilities. The previous Government announced the first £10 million and then £57 million to open up access to pools in schools, as it is obviously very sad to see good facilities not being used after school hours. We enabled 220 schools to open up their pools more than they had been doing, and we want to do more of that. We worked together with some brilliant organisations in the National Water Safety Forum, including the RNLI, Swim England, the Royal Life Saving Society and many more.”
“Member for North Ayrshire and Arran (Irene Campbell), who has a beautiful constituency, which I associate with seaside holidays as a child—and as an adult. A surprising fact in her speech was that this subject is not on the curriculum in Scotland, which seems like an obvious first step. The hon. Member for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland (Luke Myer) talked about the awful case of the missing child in his constituency. We of course hope for the best for that family. I will turn in a moment to talk about some of the things that the previous Government did. I do so not to say that everything is wonderful, because of course it is not, but because I thought that it might be a way of prompting further reflections on what more we could do to go further.”
“Member for Shrewsbury (Julia Buckley) made the crucial point about the importance of not drinking and swimming, and the critical dangers there. The hon. Member for Cannock Chase (Josh Newbury) reminded us of the benefits of being able to swim outside, yet there are certain places in which it is just not safe to swim. A number of other Members made the point that, in a more transient society, not everyone knows where those places are any more. The hon. Member for Doncaster East and the Isle of Axholme (Lee Pitcher) made a powerful speech, talking not just about Sam and his father, but about his private Member’s Bill, the Water Safety Bill. We also had a really interesting contribution from the hon.”
“Member for Esher and Walton (Monica Harding) caught my attention with her description of the Barbados of south London, which I very much enjoyed. I also strongly agreed with her tribute to water safety groups. My hon. Friend the Member for Hamble Valley (Paul Holmes) talked about the terrible case of Emily Lewis and the issue of safety on boats, which is a crucial part of this debate. The hon. Member for West Ham and Beckton (James Asser) raised the issue of those old Central Office of Information films that have stayed with all of us, particularly the chilling “The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water”, which we all seem to have seen. The hon. Member for Bangor Aberconwy (Claire Hughes) then brought us bang up to date by talking about what social media could do in this space. The hon.”
“Let me pay tribute to the hon. Member for Southampton Itchen (Darren Paffey) for leading this important debate and for doing such a good job in setting out all the different issues at stake. Although he covered a huge amount of ground in his opening statement, we also heard some excellent speeches from across the House, with everyone adding important points. We have had excellent speeches from the right hon. Member for Oxford East (Anneliese Dodds), and the hon. Members for Salford (Rebecca Long Bailey), for Gravesham (Dr Sullivan), for Bolton West (Phil Brickell), and for Portsmouth North (Amanda Martin). Various points will stay with me. My hon. Friend the Member for Meriden and Solihull East (Saqib Bhatti) raised the hugely important issue of safety on ice and the terrible, terrible case involving his young constituents. The hon.”
“The last Conservative Government added 27,000 extra teachers. Although we would never know it from the Minister’s answer, there are 400 fewer teachers in our schools than last year. Labour promised 6,500 more teachers, but it is ignoring the loss of 2,900 primary school teachers, because apparently they do not count. The loss of teachers is not a coincidence. The Confederation of School Trusts and the Association of School and College Leaders have shown that schools have been left up to 35% short in compensation for the national insurance rise. Will Ministers finally admit that they broke their promise to fully compensate schools for that tax rise?”
“Asked whether the Government were planning to restrict EHCPs so that they apply only to children in special schools, the Government’s strategic adviser on SEND, Christine Lenehan, recently said: “I think, to be honest, that’s the conversation we’re in the middle of.” Is she correct to say that Ministers are considering that, or not?”
“Ministers recently announced that they were axing level 7 apprenticeships. Strangely, they made the announcement during recess; and also strangely, it was only the day after the announcement that they finally answered my parliamentary question from April, revealing that they were making a 90% cut in those apprenticeships. This is blowing a huge hole in the NHS workforce plan, leading to a shortfall of 11,000 nurses. If Ministers will not listen to the many employers saying that this will make it much more difficult for people who are not so well-off to get into the professions, will they at least rule out cutting level 6 apprenticeships next?”
“That is fine in a sense, but Ministers have to be super clear about how they will find that time, and whether they are going to find it by funding some extra hours in the school day or something, because otherwise it inescapably means less time on other things. One of the good things that has happened, and one of the reasons standards have gone up, is that schools now spend about 13% more time teaching maths than they used to in 2010, so more time is going into this critical subject than was before. If we say that we want to have more time for something else, let us be honest about the trade-offs and what we are going to not do and let us also be honest about the consequences of that.”
“I will not go further into it than that, but the issues facing mathematics are, in a sense, part of the wider issues facing higher education. I hope that the Government will move from a patching up and mending attitude to a reformist and overhauling one. The one thing I want discourage Ministers from doing is something that I am worried will come out of the Government’s curriculum and assessment review. Although I have lots of respect for Becky Francis, who is leading the review, one of the things that Ministers have been very keen to do is say that we need to have lots more time for arts subjects—for fun subjects such as music, drama and dance.”
“We should also be clear that things that are highly economically useful, such as mathematics and science, also have intrinsic value. They are also beautiful and there is an intrinsic value to studying them—that is not just the case for some of those things, particularly the creative arts, where we see the great concentration of those who end up with very low earnings and negative returns from an economic point of view. We need to rethink. We need not just to patch up and mend the existing system, but to fundamentally rethink the incentives that it has set up. We should give ourselves the ability to make sure that we are investing in and driving up the growth of subjects such as mathematics, which are so critical to our future economy and security as a country.”
“We know from the leading work of the Institute for Fiscal Studies that, when we look at the combined perspective of the taxpayer and the student themselves, higher education is not worth it, at least from an economic point of view, for around 30% of those who go into it at the moment,. Since the work that the IFS did, which is based on those who graduated during the mid-noughties, we have seen the graduate premium decline even further. The marginal students who we have been adding have even lower earnings, so those figures could easily be worse if we were to rerun that analysis now. That needs to be addressed. There is absolutely sometimes a case for higher education to be simply beautiful—to do theology, art or whatever—and for it not to be of economic value, but we should be clear about when we choose to subsidise that.”
“The gradual move from teaching, or T, grants to a highly fees-based system gives Ministers far less control than they previously had. The Government’s decision last week to further reduce high-cost subject grants—T grants, as they used to be called—by a further 10% in real terms is a mistake in its own right because it hits the subjects such as engineering and science that we need for the future, and gives Ministers less control over what is going on in higher education. The incentives set up by the pseudo-market in education have led to a great growth in courses that are cheap to provide but do not necessarily give great value to either the student or the taxpayer.”
“In fact, while there has been about a 20% increase in the total numbers entering HE courses at university since 2018-19, the number going into maths, while marginally up, is broadly flat. Why is the improvement we are seeing in schools not leading to larger numbers doing maths at university? I am afraid that goes to the heart of the issues with our higher education system more broadly. I understand the logic of why tuition fees were brought in and I accept up to a point the idea of a market in higher education, but it seems to us that that market has gone too far. It is really a pseudo-market, because we rely entirely on young people aged 16 and 17 to drive the allocation of resources into our enormous higher education system.”
“A lot of the things that were doing a lot of good, including for maths, have been axed even though they are very small in the grand scheme of the Department for Education’s £100 billion budget. I hope that the Government will rethink those cuts. The hon. Member for St Neots and Mid Cambridgeshire also wanted to talk about the higher education part of the piece. It is very striking that although 50% more people are now doing A-level maths—a great success—and the number of people doing double or triple science at GCSE has more or less doubled, which is great progress, that has not always translated into increases in the number of people doing maths at university.”
“Dan Abramson, the chief executive of U-Maths, the umbrella organisation for university maths schools in England, and a professor of maths at King’s College London, said: “For the UK to be at the forefront of AI and the data-driven modern economy, we need excellent mathematicians from all backgrounds, and we need more of them—that means more investment, not less”. We set up the advanced mathematics support programme in 2018 to provide extra maths help to schools, and the Government have now cut it. I think that it is a mistake and I hope that they will look at it again. Unfortunately, that is part of a pattern. The Government have cut support not just for maths, but for physics, computing, Latin, cadets and behaviour hubs.”
“He said: “There’s no AI without maths and if the government is really serious about its AI strategy they have to significantly scale up the support for maths education at all levels…The big success of AMSP was to enable kids who went to schools that didn’t offer further maths to give them this opportunity”. Likewise, Adrian Smith, the Royal Society president, said it is “spectacularly short-sighted to pull funding from programmes designed to support teachers and schools to deliver better maths provision.” He also said: “Our maths education is not up to scratch—too many young people are leaving school without the skills they need for life or the well-paid jobs that will drive economic growth”.”
“Where those reforms were not made for ideological reasons because the unions said no to academisation, school choice and school accountability, things got worse. The people who suffered from that ideology were not the rich and those who could afford to go private, but the poorest. Some of the things being done now in schools are a mistake, such as hammering the budget for the advanced mathematics support programme. As has already been touched on in this debate, and as quite a lot of the people who care most about maths have pointed out, that is a big mistake. Jens Marklof, president of the London Mathematical Society, said that it will harm the chances of children from poorer areas.”
“Over the last Parliament, we increased real-terms per pupil funding by 11%. We brought in things such as maths schools and maths hubs, lots more low-stakes testing—my daughter is about to do the year 4 times tables test—and the key stage 2 tests. All those things, by the way, are still opposed by some people in the trade unions even though the evidence for the effectiveness of low-stakes testing, for example, is so strong. The National Education Union still opposes all forms of testing in primary school—a crazy position that we were right to reject in England. There has been real progress as a result of those reforms. Although everything in England is far from perfect—there is loads of room for progress and lots of problems to fix—we can see what the alternative is.”
“The gap is so big, and the deprivation progress has been so great in England, that the deprived child in England is now in a better position than the average child in Wales. That is an incredible situation. Looking at the improvement in school attainment by IDACI—income deprivation affecting children index—decile, we see improvement across the income distribution under the last Government, but the biggest improvement in England was in the bottom half of the income distribution. That is true for maths throughout the educational life cycle. Today, 90,000 more children at key stage 2—the end of junior school—meet the expected standard in reading, writing and maths than in 2015-16. That progress was driven by a number of measures, including our putting in 27,000 extra teachers over our time in government.”
“However, I can give a comparison by stating where those devolved Governments are in the results of the Programme for International Student Assessment. Between 2009 and 2022, England went from 21st to seventh in the world for maths in PISA results, and from 11th to ninth for science. Whereas Wales —where a lot of the reforms that we had in England were avoided for ideological reasons—went from 29th to 27th for maths, and slumped from 21st to 29th for science. That is part of a wider picture. I encourage everyone to read the brilliant report “Major challenges for education in Wales” by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, which points out that the average deprived child in England is now doing as well or better than the average child in Wales.”
“It would be inappropriate not to add some numbers to a debate on maths, so what happened to mathematics under the last Government? Let us look at some international comparisons. In the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study—TIMSS—between 2011 and 2023, England went from 10th in the world to sixth in the world for maths, and from ninth to fifth for science. That is remarkable progress that puts us top in the western world. We are not quite at the level of the Asian people who dominate the table, but we are the best in the west. I cannot tell hon. Members how Scotland and Wales are doing on that metric because their Governments chose to withdraw from those competitions as they did not like the scrutiny.”
“No: they are now used in quantum encryption. We have found a use for that seemingly useless thing. The same is true of one of the UK’s greatest industrial successes: Arm, which does obscure-seeming work on reduced instruction set computing. What use is that? Why would anyone need a really tiny thing that does not use much power? But we all have mobile phones, and the intellectual property from that bit of Britain’s industrial policy is now in everyone’s pocket, all over the world. Mathematics is hugely important. I completely agree with all hon. Members who have said that. I have been goaded by the brilliant speech of the hon. Member for Harlow (Chris Vince), who said that I would talk about the last Government, and of course I will.”
“Members who are less concise—they are not in this debate—trouting on in the main Chamber, I am reminded of the space-filling Hilbert curve, which is repetitious and capable of filling an infinite amount of space if left unchecked. One of my greatest beliefs is in the non-linear nature of innovation. As hon. Members have already alluded to, mathematics is a brilliant example of that. It was never obvious, when the obscure philosophers who became logicians were faffing around with strange upside down a’s and backwards e’s, that they would lay the foundations for the computation that defines our world today. I read in Quanta magazine that in the ’60s we discovered something that seemed perfectly useless: Penrose tiling—infinitely non-repeating patterns, which are very pretty and obviously totally useless, right?”
“I congratulate the hon. Member for St Neots and Mid Cambridgeshire (Ian Sollom) on securing this important debate. We have had some fantastic speeches, and any debate in which Johnny Ball gets a shout-out is a good debate in my view. Our profession, politics, is awash with mathematical metaphors. Lyndon Johnson famously said that the first rule of democracy is that you have to be able to count. In Westminster, the Treasury is always insisting on making the numbers add up. Lots of junior Ministers who interact with the Treasury and try to get money out of it discover that they get the square root of naff all from those discussions. Occasionally, when I listen to hon.”
“One can argue that we should go for a different course, but if we are going to do that, people should be explicit about it and honest about what they are actually going to do. Let me not turn into the thing that I have already criticised—the space-filling Hilbert curve—and take up endless time in this debate. It has been a hugely important debate with brilliant speeches from lots of Members from across the House. I hope that the Ministers will act on some of the brilliant suggestions that have been made, and that we can further improve math education in this country.”
“I am happy to agree that we can bring maths into many other things, and that is also a fun way of teaching maths. In return, I put back to the hon. Gentleman that there are limits to that. If we want to have more time for something else, we have to say where it is coming from. The improvement in those international league table rankings that I mentioned has not come about as a result of some sort of magic. It has come about by us spending more time on that, putting more resources into it and making it a priority. Unfortunately, not everything can be a priority. If everything is a priority, then nothing is. The last Government chose to prioritise maths and STEM. I think it was the right decision.”
“I will end by asking some questions about the facts. Will the Minister agree to publish information on how many children are currently on transitional protection and how much the end of that protection will reduce entitlement to free school meals? Will he agree to publish how much pupil premium funding schools will lose overall as a result of breaking the link between FSM and the pupil premium? Just to ask again, so that the whole House hears the answer, will he rule out abolishing EHCPs outside special schools—yes or no?”
“I ask the Minister to spit it out: how much will this decision cost schools, and how much is it saving the DFE? On a similar point, will the Minister confirm that the Government will apply the same approach to holiday activities and food, which would also not trigger an increase in that funding? Is the same also true of home-school transport, and how is this all being paid for? I think we need a little more detail. Opposition Members have become rather cautious about positive-sounding announcements from this Government. For example, the other day Ministers were here to announce that they would continue the adoption and special guardianship support fund, but it must just have slipped their mind to mention that it was being cut by 40%. That is why we like to know the detail when we get positive announcements.”
“The pupil premium is a great achievement of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition Government, and it is worth £1,480 per pupil in primary schools and a bit over £1,000 in secondary schools. As a result of today’s decision, schools are going to lose that funding. With 1.2 million pupils on transitional protection, bringing with them about £1,200 each, schools are going to lose the £1.5 billion currently going to them in pupil premium funding. Will that funding be replaced by this announcement? No, because today the Government have for the first time broken the link between FSM eligibility and pupil premium funding. On one side of the ledger, £1.5 billion has been lost, and on the other side of the ledger, schools are not getting it back. I had wondered where all the money was coming from, and now of course we know.”
“That has roughly doubled the proportion of pupils who are eligible from 13.6% to 25.7%. However, the Department for Education has announced that those protections will now end in September 2026, when the new policy comes in. By how much will the end of those transitional protections reduce the number of children who are eligible for FSM? Am I right in thinking that it is by 1.2 million? Will the Minister agree—he is looking away—to finally publish a figure? How many children who have been on transitional protection will lose their free school meals when they change phase of education? Will the Minister finally admit to the figure? There is another sting in the tail today, because school budgets are going to be hit—that is how this policy is being paid for. That is because FSM is the gateway to pupil premium funding.”
“We know that the Department for Education recently announced a real-terms cut of 10% to university teaching grants, and it has abolished 90% of higher apprenticeships—funnily enough, they announced that during the recess. Now the education press are saying that the next cost-saving measure to pay for announcements like this will be to abolish education, health and care plans for everything other than special schools. Will the Minister rule that out today? If he does not rule it out, the whole House will hear, and we will know exactly what is going to happen next. Turning to the numbers, what is the real net effect of all this? Transitional protections were established in 2018 to ensure that pupils who gained FSM would not lose them while universal credit was being rolled out.”
“Under the last Government, although there was an increase in achievement across the board, the biggest increase was in the lower half of the income distribution. That is much harder to achieve when the Government have taken £400 million out of our schools. What else is being done to balance the costs? We already know that the Government have cut support for maths, science, physics, Latin, computing and cadets in schools, and got rid of the successful behaviour hubs. We know that nurseries, which the Minister talked about, are saying they are on the brink because of the national insurance increase. In fact, the Early Years Alliance says the situation is “catastrophic”.”
“Disgracefully, they have not done any distributional analysis of the £25 billion that they are taking away, which is particularly targeted at low-income households. Will the Minister say how many households that will push into poverty? Will he finally admit what the figure is? While free school meals are obviously welcome, the things that are being cut to pay for them are much less welcome. For example, the Government broke their promise to fully fund the national insurance increase for schools, and some have been short-changed by 35%. They also broke their promise to fully fund the pay award. According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, that leaves a £400 million funding hole for our schools.”