Opposition Day: Access to remote education and the quality of free school meals

Proposed by Kate Green

I beg to move, That this House believes that families need more support during school and college closures; and that those eligible should be guaranteed to receive the full value of free school meals for the duration of the school year, including during all holidays; and calls on the Secretary of St… I beg to move, That this House believes that families need more support during school and college closures; and that those eligible should be guaranteed to receive the full value of free school meals for the duration of the school year, including during all holidays; and calls on the Secretary of State for Education to set a deadline to ensure that every learner has the resources required to learn remotely, and provide a weekly update to Parliament on implementing this. Today, and at least until February half-term, millions of children have not attended school and will instead be studying at home. No one wants to be in this situation—we all believe that school is the best place for children’s learning and wellbeing—but for now, faced with a rising coronavirus infection rate, we understand that many children need to study at home. They, their families and hard-working school staff deserve to know that the Government are doing all they can to support them. That is why we have brought forward a motion this evening that asks two fundamental questions: first, are the Government doing everything they can to support pupils to keep learning remotely; and secondly, are the Government doing everything they can to ensure that children do not go hungry when they cannot get a free meal in school? If the answer to those questions is no, which I believe it is, then Members, whatever their party, should vote for our motion. These should be matters on which we can all agree. I am sure there is nobody in this House who does not believe that children should receive a world-class education and that every family in this country should be able to provide their children with nourishing meals, but the reality is that the Government have not done enough—too slow to secure digital access for those who need it, while overseeing yet another scandal in delivering free school meals to children in need of them. The Prime Minister and, indeed, the Secretary of State claimed to be outraged by images of food parcels they saw on social media last week, but I and my party are outraged at Ministers’ consistent and unforgivable failure to stand with children and families throughout this pandemic. Pupils and parents deserve a Government who are on their side. They deserve better than this Government. I pay tribute to everyone who has gone above and beyond to keep children safe and learning throughout the pandemic—the teachers, leaders and support staff across our education system who have worked hard in extraordinary circumstances to keep children learning safely; and the parents who face the unenviable task of balancing work, educating their children and childcare, too often without the support they need. At the beginning of this pandemic, 1.8 million children did not have the devices or internet connections they needed to work from home and, in that first national lockdown, many of those children struggled to access remote learning. Despite the best efforts of teachers, school leaders and support staff, some children fell behind their peers because they lacked the basic resources to continue learning when they could not be in the classroom. The Secretary of State rightly started to provide some devices to some of those children. He set a target of providing 230,000 devices by the end of June last year. Not only did that fall far short of the number of children who needed them, but he did not even deliver all those devices on time. Perhaps he could have learned a lesson from the Labour Government in Wales, which repurposed existing orders and were supporting pupils with devices by the end of May, according to the independent Education Policy Institute. Being less prepared than the Welsh Labour Administration may have been understandable at the beginning of the pandemic, but the Secretary of State’s inability to learn from his failures and from their success is inexcusable. Instead of redoubling his efforts to get devices to all the pupils who lacked digital access

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