Catch-up Premium — House of Commons, 2021-06-15
Topic: Education
Nicolas John Gibb (Conservative, Centre-right): We did take the advice of Sir Kevan Collins, who supported our introduction of more funding for the national tutoring programme and the £400 million to improve the continuing professional development and training of teachers. We set up a review into the time element of the advice that Sir Kevan gave Ministers, which will report later this year in time to inform the spending review The House has a number of opportunities to scrutinise the work of the Treasury in oral questions, and the annual supply and appropriation legislation will be debated before the summer recess. There are also regular appearances by Treasury Ministers and officials before the Public Accounts Committee and the Treasury Committee. Since the Government came into office in 2010, we have been focused on our mission of raising school standards for all pupils. Successive Prime Ministers and Education Secretaries have put in place ambitious plans to make sure that, no matter where you are born or where in the country you live, you will receive a world-class education. That is not a programme for a single term of Government; nor is it an initiative to get headlines. It is generational reform—long, steady, painstaking and difficult. We have much still to achieve, but we are making progress Before we came into Government in 2010, the correlation between parental wealth and pupil achievement was stubbornly entrenched. Children from poorer homes, who were already behind in their development when they started school, were falling further behind their peers. Rather than being an engine of social mobility, our school system was calcifying inequality. For Conservatives, for whom education is the gateway to opportunity, this was unacceptable We took bold, decisive action that was opposed all the way by the Opposition, but which has led to better schools and better life chances for young people. We overhauled Labour’s national curriculum, which was unnecessarily bureaucratic and too focused on a range of generic skills rather than rich, subject-based content, and replaced it with a new national curriculum, which provides pupils with an introduction to the essential knowledge they need to be educated citizens, immersing them in the best that has been thought and said. We took action to make sure that teachers got better training, and we introduced the pupil premium to give schools the funding they need to support disadvantaged pupils Our reforms are turning the tide, rebuffing the fatalistic assumptions of too many who seemed to accept that the gap between rich and poor is inevitable—the soft bigotry of low expectations, which for years was writing off pupil’s lives rather than striving to give them the education needed to influence their own destiny. Academic standards have been rising and the attainment gap between advantaged and disadvantaged pupils has been closing. Thanks to our reforms, more pupils are taking core academic GCSEs, more children are reading fluently and more children are attending good and outstanding schools We have taken action throughout this pandemic to ensure that children are supported, but our commitment to provide a good education for every child pre-dates covid-19 reaching our shores. We produced the best schools budget settlement for many years at the 2019 spending review. Totalling £14.4 billion, that is the largest cash boost for schools in a decade Core school funding increased by £2.6 billion in 2020-21, and is increasing by £4.8 billion and £7.1 billion in 2021-22 and 2022-23 respectively compared with 2019-20, including significant additional funding for children with special educational needs and disabilities. That unrelenting drive to give children and young people the best start in life meant that we were in a better place to handle the unprecedented challenges that the pandemic posed We know that the pandemic, as the hon. Member for Houghton and Sunderland South (Bridget Phillipson) said, has disproportionately affected children, with most missing at least 115 days of school. That is precisely why we took immediate action to provide education remotely, delivering more than 1.3 million laptops or tablets alongside wireless routers and access to free mobile data for disadvantaged families.