Transcript:
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gray. First, I thank the petitioners, my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Jonathan Gullis) and, of course, the around 600 people in my constituency who have signed these petitions, which I am pleased MPs have the opportunity to discuss. I will focus my speech on two main aspects: the call for schools and colleges to close due to covid-19 and the call to cancel examinations.
While I appreciate colleagues’ arguments, I am not supportive of closing schools or colleges. School closures are incredibly damaging to young people—to their education, health and mental wellbeing—so they must be used only as a last resort. I am grateful for the best efforts of teachers and parents to provide high-quality remote learning as well as in-house learning for vulnerable children and children of key workers during the previous closures earlier in the year. We owe our teachers an immense debt of gratitude as they have worked tirelessly right through the year to support students, often going beyond teaching to ensure that emphasis is placed on young people’s wellbeing.
However, the period of partial school closures inevitably led to many children—especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds—falling behind. We cannot put the futures of our young people at risk. There is simply no substitute for face-to-face learning for those at a young age, so I will continue to support the Government in keeping schools and colleges open.
While inevitably there have been covid outbreaks in schools, those have often been controlled thanks to the collaboration of national and local government and schools. There is clear evidence that children are much less susceptible to the damaging effects of covid-19 and ONS data identifies teaching as a low-risk profession, in part thanks to the monumental efforts of schools over the last few months to ensure their facilities are covid-19-secure. It has not been easy to implement and maintain new safety measures, so I thank all managerial, administrative and teaching staff for their hard work.
I would like to mention in particular Cobden Primary School in my constituency, where during a recent visit I saw at first hand the lengths gone to so as to keep children and staff safe while ensuring that the impact on education was as little as possible. Rawlins Academy has also done a fantastic job on that, although it has found it more difficult than others due to its limited space and the nature of its facilities. The staff and head especially have done their utmost to reduce the impact on education, but in some cases school bubbles have been out of school for some time, which is far from ideal. I raised that specific case recently with the Education Secretary.
Instead of closing schools, which only hinders social mobility, widens the disadvantage gap and places a burden on working parents, we should continue to work with them to ensure they have the resources and infrastructure they need to accommodate students and teachers safely on site or supplement their current facilities with additional local buildings and resources, should that be necessary. On that, I ask the Minister to look at the specific case of Rawlins Academy in Loughborough.
I am not in favour of cancelling exams, because we would be denying the child their moment of demonstrating all they have worked for and achieved, which gives them confidence to progress further. However, we should look at what adaptations could be made to aid schools in delivering the examination timetable, should social distancing still be in place next summer. I am pleased that the Minister is looking at this matter and ask her to consider what steps can be taken to secure examinations in 2021 and provide consistency and a firm plan for pupils.
