Adam Dance

I thank the hon. Member for Bracknell (Peter Swallow) for securing this important debate. For years, we have had an education system that looks pretty good on league tables or spreadsheets but does not really help young people develop essential skills for dealing with this rapidly changing world. Rather than repeat remarks that I have made before, and that other hon. Members have made today, I will cut to the chase and list some issues and solutions that I urge the Minister to consider—so grab your pen, Minister. The first issue is funding. Somerset is one of the 40 lowest funded education authorities in the UK. We need to see a level playing field for funding, with an increase in school and college funding per pupil above the rate of inflation every year. The second issue is the type of skills we are teaching. Yeovil college does an amazing job with vocational and technical education, but we need the Government to go further. Can we make AI and digital skills training a core part of the national curriculum as its own subject? If we want to innovate, we need teaching that focuses on the skills needed for business and self-employment, although I may be biased because I ran my own landscaping company. Thirdly, we sadly have pockets of real deprivation in Yeovil. Will the Minister extend pupil premium funding to disadvantaged young people aged 16 to 18, so they can get the quality education or training they want, rather than having to work any old job—or worse? My final ask, unsurprisingly, relates to SEND. Can the Minister set out when the research into universal screening will conclude, and whether the Government will commit to adopting it, if that is supported by the research? We cannot help young people develop essential skills without working out how they learn best. More broadly, can the Minister please promise that the upcoming reforms to the SEND system will not mean that children with SEND lose the right to dedicated time with teaching assistants or speech and language therapists to help develop essential skills? The maths GCSE post-16 resit policy sees too many young people with SEND forced to retake exams that are just not useful for them. It comes with stigma and takes time away from developing the skills they actually need. Can the Minister commit to abolishing or reworking the resit policy to meet the needs of a wide range of young people with SEND more flexibly? I could go on for hours about this subject, but I have bent the ear of the Minister many times, so I will leave it there.