Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for giving me the opportunity to take part in this most important debate on the public health crisis facing this country.
I believe that it is right to go into lockdown and stay at home as much as possible to protect ourselves and others, and I will be supporting the measures today. However, these actions should have come much sooner. This is sadly the result of a long line of Government failures, from the lockdown coming too late in March last year, through the fiasco of test and trace, to the chopping and changing of tiers and relaxations in the lead-up to the latest lockdown. I have many concerns about the lockdown, not least economic ones, particularly in respect of people who are not supported at all by Government programmes or the Chancellor’s support packages, but today I will concentrate on just one: the situation in our schools and the impact on public health.
At the eleventh hour, schools were instructed to close. As chair of the all-party parliamentary group on digital skills, I have raised the lack of data and devices for school-age children throughout the pandemic—for the past 10 months—often working with my hon. Friend the Member for Mitcham and Morden (Siobhain McDonagh). Ten months on, it is still not sorted. Even with today’s announcement by the Secretary of State for Education, about 1 million school-age children will lack adequate data and devices to learn effectively. That is a disgrace.
Children in that position have now been classified as vulnerable, compounding the situation in our schools. Schools have been given no guidance on which children are to be in school and which are not. Do they have to impose limits? Should they include spacing? There is no guidance. I have spoken to many headteachers in my area today.
Alternative education hardly gets a mention. It has a frequently changing school population and the devices to do not follow the pupils.
What is the prioritisation for vulnerable children and for children with two key worker parents, one key worker with another parent working full time or a key worker with another parent not in work? Social care and hospitals will come to a standstill if this is not sorted. Teachers cannot be in two places at once: they cannot teach what is potentially more than half the school population in lessons and teach online.
All of those issues need to be addressed for the lockdown to be effective, for our frontline healthcare and social care system to cope, and for all our children and young people to receive an equitable and fair level of education.
4.17 pm