argyrotsipi/train-dataset huggingface dataset:
School Funding — House of Commons, 2017-01-25
Topic: Education
Ruth Margaret Cadbury (Labour, Centre-left): Teachers in the borough of Hounslow have achieved amazing results over the last 10 or more years. Almost all our schools are good or outstanding, and value-added is positive in every school. That is in a borough where all schools and all classrooms contain children with additional needs of some kind—children who arrive not speaking English, children with disabilities and special educational needs, children who are homeless and keep having to move on or who are sofa surfing with their parents, and children with many other needs. Most of our schools suffer from severe aircraft noise from planes approaching Heathrow The overall savings proposed by the Department for Education for schools in my constituency by 2018-19—a combination of the national funding formula and the wider cost pressures that they face now—amount to £5.1 million. That is a 6.2% cut. The existing cost pressures include, as other Members have mentioned, inflation, the apprenticeship levy, pension and national insurance costs, the requirement for independent careers advice, and more children with special needs in our mainstream schools As in the Secretary of State’s constituency, the cost pressures that my heads face will mean, on the whole, fewer teachers and support staff, plus other cuts. We have established that each of our secondary schools will have to lose between nine and 18 teachers, and primary schools will have to have up to 11 fewer teachers. Fewer subjects will be taught at key stages 4 and 5, there will be fewer external visits and fewer specialists will come in to teach and enthuse children about future jobs and careers, staying safe or other specialist issues that we want our children to learn about and get their heads around. There will be less specialist and individual support for children who have additional needs, who do not speak English, who are very gifted or who have mental health problems and need counselling. Agency costs for supply teachers, as our headteachers face the recruitment and retention crisis that is affecting all subject areas, will add to the salary bill In classrooms where there are children who need additional attention, teachers and children will feel the impact of the cuts every day. More classes will be taught with only one adult—the class teacher—in the room. The lack of additional support is a cost for every child in the classroom, both those who have additional needs and those who do not. The cuts will mean that less is spent on repairing buildings, improving outdoor space or buying the equipment and materials that the curriculum requires.
School Funding — House of Commons, 2017-01-25
Topic: Education
Alison McGovern (Labour, Centre-left): I pay tribute to the shadow Secretary of State, my hon. Friend the Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Angela Rayner), who made a brilliant speech. She demonstrated, as has the fact that a large number of Members wanted to speak in this debate, that education truly matters in our country I will make a few brief points. The first is that the narrative of this discussion is completely wrong. It is a typical Tory divide-and-rule strategy. I do not believe that schools that might gain from a change in the funding formula want to do so at the expense of other children, teachers and schools. For example, I know that the folks who are set to gain from the changes in Knowsley, just across the River Mersey from where I live, do not want to do so at the expense of children and schools in Liverpool, Sefton and Wirral. We should not be dividing people, but bringing them together Schools in Wirral are set to lose hundreds of pounds per pupil. That plays into another classic Tory narrative, which is that people do not need money to get anywhere in life or to help in education. The hon. and learned Member for South East Cambridgeshire (Lucy Frazer) said that money is not sufficient to drive achievement. In fact, money may not be a sufficient condition, but it is a necessary one, as all the evidence shows. I am next to my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg), who led the London Challenge. I know he would say that it was reform and improvement, alongside decent funding, that resulted in those achievements under the last Labour Government that we are all proud of.
School Funding — House of Commons, 2017-01-25
Topic: Education
Stephen Creswell Timms (Labour, Centre-left): Will my hon. Friend join me in welcoming one element of the funding formula, which is the inclusion for the first time of a mobility factor to reflect the additional costs of high pupil turnover? However, does she agree that it ought to be larger than the 0.1% of the total that is being allocated on that basis at the moment?
School Funding — House of Commons, 2017-01-25
Topic: Education
Alison McGovern (Labour, Centre-left): I have never disagreed with my right hon. Friend yet and I do not now As a Member of Parliament, I am afraid of very little, but I still get nervous when I have to go and see local headteachers. I want to give the final words of my speech over to those headteachers. To begin with, Mark Whitehill, who is head of Gayton Primary School in Heswall, spoke this simple truth: "If Education really is a priority, we need the staff to help us deliver it!" Another brilliant head in my area, Catherine Kelly, agrees with that. She said that her job is about life chances, but colleagues whom she respects as fantastic educationists are talking about leaving the profession because, as heads, they are not focusing on the right things as they are having to balance the books and make ends meet. She said that they are "invariably being set up to fail" She is frugal and knows that if the school is overstaffed, it is a waste of the students’ resources, so she would never make that happen. She says she is afraid that the Government "clearly doesn’t understand education", which I believe is true The last word goes to David Hazeldine, a great head from Wirral, who says: "The fundamental issue is that there is not enough money in the system. Teacher recruitment shortages and massive underfunding are placing children’s education and well-being at risk." He says that that is "creating a perfect storm" Those three heads have put it better than I ever could. I ask the Secretary of State to learn the lessons of schools in her own constituency and recognise that although money is not all that schools need, they cannot do without it if they want to give kids a chance.
School Funding — House of Commons, 2017-01-25
Topic: Education
Michael Joseph Patrick Kane (Labour, Centre-left): For the first time in a generation, schools will face spending cuts to their budgets—[Interruption.] Right out of the gate, the Secretary of State is chuntering. In her authority area, that equates to a 15% cut, with £13 million coming out of her schools’ budgets by 2020. I look forward to campaigning in her constituency on this issue The Department expects schools to find £3 billion of savings in this Parliament to counteract cumulative cost pressures, including pay rises, the introduction of the national living wage, higher employer national insurance contributions, contributions to the teachers’ pension scheme and the apprenticeship levy, as the hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton (James Berry) and Labour Members said. The hon. Gentleman is happy with the national funding formula, but I have to point out that his schools will receive an overall cut of 12% in this Parliament. We are talking about an 8% real-terms reduction in funding per pupil in this Parliament The Department regularly compiles a list of future policy changes that will affect schools, but it has no plans to assess the financial implications for schools of these changes. We have no assurances that the policy is affordable within current spending plans without adversely affecting educational outcomes. The Government are leaving schools and multi-academy trusts to manage the consequences individually. The Department has clearly not communicated to schools the scale and pace of the savings that will be needed to meet the expected cost pressures The proportion of maintained secondary schools spending more than their income increased last year from 33% to 59%—[Interruption.] No matter what the right hon. Member for East Devon (Sir Hugo Swire) says, this Government have racked up a £1.7 trillion debt on their watch and now want to pass on part of that debt to our school system. The Department expects much of the savings to come from procurement and the introduction of shared services. Changing procurement and shared services requires strong leadership, clear plans for achieving savings, effective risk management and support from stakeholders. That leadership is clearly lacking among the Government Members. The Minister himself has said that he is confident that pages of guidance on the Department’s website will provide enough support for schools—it will not.
School Funding — House of Commons, 2017-01-25
Topic: Education
Michael Joseph Patrick Kane (Labour, Centre-left): I have literally seconds left As the National Audit Office has suggested, school leaders who do not have support are likely to make decisions that make the teacher retention crisis worse. The NAO went on to say that the Government’s current "approach to managing the risks to schools’ financial sustainability cannot be judged to be effective or providing value for money" It is important to recognise the impact that the required efficiency savings will have on staff. We expect already unsustainable workload pressures to increase as staff efficiencies eventually start to bite. Moreover, the size of the savings that schools will have to find will lead to worse educational outcomes, and the biggest impact will be felt by those in the most deprived areas and those with special needs We know that staff costs represent any school’s largest expenditure—74% of schools’ budgets are spent on staff—so it is not hard to see that to save money over the next few years, schools will inevitably end up cutting back on staff. That will have a knock-on effect on workload, morale, class sizes and the breadth of the curriculum that schools can offer. All this is happening at a time when we are expecting a 3% increase in the number of children entering school. A bad situation is compounded by the national funding formula. Some Conservative Members, who really missed the point, had been expecting "jam tomorrow" from the formula, which was a manifesto commitment, but now they are waking up to the reality that the schools in their constituency will not benefit from its introduction. Hardly any area is left unscathed. In their excellent speeches, the hon. Members for The Cotswolds (Geoffrey Clifton-Brown) and for South Cambridgeshire (Heidi Allen) said that the funding formula was not the point; the point was the cuts and pressures faced by schools I ask the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire to speak to her hon. and learned Friend the Member for South East Cambridgeshire (Lucy Frazer), who completely missed the point. The House will have been astonished by the slap in the face for northern teachers, who are apparently not ambitious enough for their pupils, and that is from a Government who introduced the Weller report on raising standards.
School Funding — House of Commons, 2017-01-25
Topic: Education
Michael Joseph Patrick Kane (Labour, Centre-left): It was a slap in the face, and the hon. and learned Lady’s authority in Cambridgeshire will face a 4% cut on top of all the other pressures that are going on The Tories are failing our children. They are overseeing the first real-terms cut in the schools budget for over two decades—indeed, since the 1970s, as was pointed out by my hon. Friend the Member for Wakefield (Mary Creagh). By their own preferred measure on standards, we have declined in the world PISA—programme for international student assessment—rankings In a moment the Minister will stand up and either talk about synthetic phonics, or say that 1.8 million children are in better schools. That, of course, is because Labour identified those schools in 2010 and Ofsted came back to reassess them, and because there are now more children in the system—the primary system. This dire situation for our schools will only continue to get worse as a result of the Government’s cuts and their new funding formula.
Rifleman Lee Bagley: MOD Duty of Care — House of Commons, 2017-01-25
Topic: Law and Crime
Adrian Edward Bailey (Labour, Centre-left): It is perfectly true that, parallel to this issue, ex-Rifleman Lee Bagley has been pursuing compensation, but I deliberately focused my comments on the duty of care rather than the legalistic process that surrounds the compensation issue, and that is what I really want brought out today.
Farming Sector — House of Commons, 2017-01-26
Topic: Agriculture
Questions: What discussions he has had with the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs on the priority that will be accorded to the farming sector during negotiations on the UK leaving the EU.
Mary Helen Creagh (Labour, Centre-left): UK farmers face a triple jeopardy from Brexit, with the loss of common agricultural policy subsidies, potential new tariffs on currently tariff-free trade with the EU, and the prospect of trade deals with bigger countries such as the US flooding the UK with cheaper imports that have lower food safety and animal welfare standards. The Secretary of State said that he would do everything necessary to protect the City of London. Can the Minister give the same assurances to UK farmers and farming businesses, which make up 25% of UK businesses?
Farming Sector — House of Commons, 2017-01-26
Topic: Agriculture
Questions: What discussions he has had with the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs on the priority that will be accorded to the farming sector during negotiations on the UK leaving the EU.
Christina Elizabeth Rees (Labour, Centre-left): Almost 40% of EU funds are spent on the common agricultural policy, so it is clear that supporting farming is a central aim of the European Union. Will the Minister comment on the schemes that the Government are considering as replacements for the CAP to reflect the importance of farming to the UK?
UK-EU Relationship — House of Commons, 2017-01-26
Topic: Foreign Trade
Thangam Elizabeth Rachel Debbonaire (Labour, Centre-left): I thank the Secretary of State for that answer, but will he please explain to the aerospace industry, the health service, the universities and other major employers in my constituency, which account for thousands of jobs, how they should have confidence in this country’s ability to negotiate beneficial trade deals when we have barely any specialist trade negotiators and we have had no experience of negotiating trade agreements for decades?
UK-EU Relationship — House of Commons, 2017-01-26
Topic: Foreign Trade
Hilary James Benn (Labour, Centre-left): The Government say they want nothing further to do with the European Court of Justice but, as the Secretary of State well knows, in any new free trade agreement with the 27 member states there will have to be a legal arbitration mechanism whose rulings we will be obliged to implement. If the European Court of Justice is not acceptable, what court would be?
UK-EU Relationship — House of Commons, 2017-01-26
Topic: Macroeconomics
Jenny Chapman (Labour, Centre-left): Well, the Secretary of State can work as fast as he can I suppose, but we need the White Paper before the Committee stage. When we get it, will it be a cut-and-paste of the Prime Minister’s speech, or will we have assessments of the financial impact of different options on this country?
Support for Agriculture — House of Commons, 2017-01-26
Topic: Agriculture
Questions: What recent discussions he has had with Cabinet colleagues, as part of the preparations for the negotiations on the UK leaving the EU, on support for farmers.
Christopher Philip James Elmore (Labour, Centre-left): In the Prime Minister’s speech last week, she failed to mention anything about the agricultural sector. When the Minister publishes the White Paper, will he guarantee that the farming, fisheries and agricultural sector is a key element of it, as the industry really needs assurances of support once we have left the EU?
Businesses: UK and EU — House of Commons, 2017-01-26
Topic: Foreign Trade
Questions: What assessment he has made of the potential effect of the UK leaving the EU on businesses in (a) the UK and (b) the EU.; What will the Minister do to ensure that research leaders from EU countries can continue to take positions at UK research institutions after we leave the EU?
Emma Elizabeth Reynolds (Labour, Centre-left): Manufacturing companies in the aerospace and automotive sectors are worried about potential delays at the border and customs duties when we leave the EU. The Secretary of State, and the Prime Minister in her speech, suggested that associate membership of the customs union might be possible. Will the Minister confirm that, unless that associate membership covers most sectors of our economy, it will fall foul of World Trade Organisation rules?
Businesses: UK and EU — House of Commons, 2017-01-26
Topic: Foreign Trade
Questions: What assessment he has made of the potential effect of the UK leaving the EU on businesses in (a) the UK and (b) the EU.; What will the Minister do to ensure that research leaders from EU countries can continue to take positions at UK research institutions after we leave the EU?
Matthew Thomas Pennycook (Labour, Centre-left): Far from being a clear exposition of policy, the Prime Minister’s appeal for a hybrid customs arrangement with Europe sadly raised far more questions than it answered. Will the forthcoming White Paper expand on her remarks and provide businesses across the country with the clarity that they need about how the alternative arrangements might affect them?
Government Negotiations — House of Commons, 2017-01-26
Topic: International Affairs
Helen Catherine Goodman (Labour, Centre-left): The Secretary of State has repeatedly said that he can maintain flexibility and give the House a say through the great repeal Bill, but that only covers things in legislation. When will the House be able to consider the value of the EU agencies and the cost of setting up new UK ones?
Single Market Access — House of Commons, 2017-01-26
Topic: Foreign Trade
John Derek Twigg (Labour, Centre-left): I recently met representatives of a very important multinational manufacturing company that employs people in my constituency. They told me that they did not believe that the Government understood the concerns of industry about Brexit, and particularly about the customs union. Why does the Minister think that is?
Single Market Access — House of Commons, 2017-01-26
Topic: Foreign Trade
Paul Christopher Blomfield (Labour, Centre-left): The Secretary of State provided some clarity on his priorities for access to the single market in response to questions on Tuesday’s statement. He told the right hon. Member for Broxtowe (Anna Soubry) that he was seeking "a comprehensive free trade agreement and a comprehensive customs agreement that will deliver the exact same benefits as we have". —[Official Report, 24 January 2017; Vol. 620, c. 169.] He meant the "exact same benefits" as those of being inside the single market. Will the Minister confirm that that is his Department’s negotiating position so that we can measure the Department’s success against it?
Manufacturing Industry — House of Commons, 2017-01-26
Topic: Foreign Trade
Matthew Toby Perkins (Labour, Centre-left): I am glad to hear that that work is being done. Has the Minister established how many British manufacturing factories are in competition internally with other factories in France and Germany? Does he realise how catastrophic it would be for our manufacturing industry if there were tariffs on products made in the UK that factories in France and Germany did not have?
Higher Education Students and Staff — House of Commons, 2017-01-26
Topic: Education
Questions: What discussions he has had with the Secretary of State for Education on the implications of the UK leaving the EU for the free movement of higher education students and staff.
Nicklaus Thomas-Symonds (Labour, Centre-left): I taught for many years in the universities sector before entering this House and saw at first hand the benefits that overseas students bring to our universities financially, culturally and socially. What assurances can the Minister give that overseas students will continue to come in the same numbers and more following Brexit?
EU Nationals in the UK — House of Commons, 2017-01-26
Topic: International Affairs
Questions: What priority he plans to accord to the future status of EU nationals in the UK during negotiations on the UK leaving the EU.
Wesley Paul William Streeting (Labour, Centre-left): Those problems notwithstanding, there are many talented people from the European Union who have made an enormous contribution to the economy and the cultural life of our country. Surely the right hon. Gentleman agrees that he does not need an agreement with other EU member states. There is going to be an agreement, and he would get a lot of good will from the public and from our partners across the European Union if he unilaterally made that commitment today.
Trade Dispute Mechanisms — House of Commons, 2017-01-26
Topic: Foreign Trade
Questions: What assessment he has made, as part of his Department’s plans for negotiations on the UK leaving the EU, of the potential merits of different forms of trade dispute mechanisms with the EU.
Victoria Jane Foxcroft (Labour, Centre-left): The Prime Minister has said that she wants a comprehensive free trade agreement with the EU and that, in future, our laws will be interpreted by British judges in British courts, but every comprehensive free trade agreement has some sort of independent trade dispute resolution mechanism. Does the Secretary of State agree that this sort of inconsistency needs to be ironed out by rigorous parliamentary scrutiny of the Prime Minister’s plan?
Security Policy — House of Commons, 2017-01-26
Topic: International Affairs
Questions: What discussions he has had with Cabinet colleagues on ensuring future co-operation with the EU on security policy after the UK has left the EU.
Barry John Sheerman (Labour, Centre-left): Does the Minister understand that parliamentarians across Europe are deeply worried about the knock-on effect of our leaving the EU on NATO’s stability and future? That is the truth. Forget about what is happening in the United States with the new President; will the Minister assure the House that this country’s commitment to NATO will be redoubled, not diminished?
Topical Questions — House of Commons, 2017-01-26
Topic: International Affairs
Questions: With the UK being a net importer of agricultural goods from the EU and the EU being the UK’s biggest agricultural market, what assurances can my right hon. Friend give to farmers that a key part of our negotiations will involve removing agricultural tariffs on both the UK and EU sides, which is in both our interests?
Keir Starmer (Labour, Centre-left): Now that we have a commitment to a White Paper, the role of Parliament in the article 50 process needs to be determined, which is why Labour will seek to table an amendment to the proposed article 50 Bill to require the Secretary of State to lay before the House periodic reports, at intervals of no less than two months, on the progress of the negotiations under article 50. Will the Secretary of State commit now to the principle of periodic reports? [Interruption.]