Armed Forces Covenant — House of Commons, 2018-11-22
Topic: Education
Anne-Marie Belinda Trevelyan (Conservative, Centre-right): It is an absolute pleasure to speak in this debate. I set up the all-party parliamentary group on the armed forces covenant when I was first elected in 2015, and found that the covenant had been published for five years, but had never been discussed in the House. It was a great pleasure to persuade the Backbench Business Committee to give colleagues and me time to do so. Two years on, it is even more exciting to see the Government bringing the matter forward themselves. I commend the Minister because I know that it is down to his efforts that this is now part of the national conversation. That is, of course, what the covenant is and should be—part of the national conversation. It is also a moral obligation that is practically delivered, and it is thought about by everybody who lives and works in our great country I will cover a few areas today. The report is extensive and shows the real depth of work that is beginning to emerge in this area, and that is fantastic to see. I would like to raise just a few issues that are brought to me most often by serving families and, indeed, veterans The first is education for the children of service personnel. It is fantastic that the Department has agreed to finance the education support fund for another two years. This is used by those who are doing research and helping us to understand, in particular by data collection, much more about the impacts on service family children. That is incredibly welcome, because it is very difficult for Ministers to make decisions that will genuinely be effective if they do not understand the realities of the situation I introduced a ten-minute rule Bill some 18 months ago asking the Department for Education to change the status of military children when they have to move to the same as that of looked-after children. The Minister said that it can sometimes be a four-month wait, but several families have come to me for whom it was six or eight weeks to deployment. In those cases, there is not only no time to get their lives in order and sort themselves out, but invariably the wife was doing most of the work because her husband was serving, although in one case the wife was a serving member of the armed forces. It is incredibly difficult, and the challenge with civilian schools is that people cannot apply for a school unless they have a house, and they cannot get a house until they know where they are going, and the Department can only move them so fast when they have a six-week window to go from one deployment to another There is progress, but I urge the Minister to push the Department for Education further to take this on. It involves a change of regulations, not primary legislation, and it would make a dramatic difference to a very small number of families who get very short-term deployments in the middle of the school year and whose children are just left out in the cold. Not this September but last, there was a statistic that showed that more than 70 children were still not in school in November because they had special needs and a place could not be found for them in the new location.