Speeches by Sewards.

“Time is short, so I will leave it there, Chair.”

“With workforce, we have understandably focused on the things that are going poorly; 11% of people going to food banks is frightening. Are there are any examples of good practice in the sector? Can you give us any evidence of where it is going well? If you cannot give any evidence of that, what does best practice look l…”

“That is fantastic to hear.”

“Parallel to the terrible injustice inflicted on Jimmy Lai, my constituent Chloe Cheung still has to live with a £100,000 bounty on her head. I spoke with her this weekend, and her resolve has never been stronger, despite knowing that anyone in the UK can claim that bounty. In the spirit of keeping the conversation goin…”

“The Government announced last October that they are going to introduce a new reading test for year 8 students. I think you welcomed that, Professor Ricketts. Would you mind elaborating on that very briefly?”

“Thank you. Are there any other contributions on that open question? I just have a couple of follow-ups if not.”

“There will trials of the assessment, but I would have to understand how that applies in this context too. Are there any final thoughts about that year 8 assessment that is getting introduced? No.”

“It is such a fascinating session today and the time has absolutely flown by. I certainly have advice that I will take back and use on my four-year-old and one-year-old. I want to get into the testing and assessment question a bit more. You have already touched on it quite a bit today. What is the impact of testing and …”

“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Sir Edward. Controlling our borders is a basic function of the state. The Government inherited open borders and are now undertaking the serious work required to fix them, so I welcome the Minister’s efforts. However, I think there are some tweaks we could make. I have spo…”

“I completely understand where my hon. Friend is coming from. The people I was speaking about just before he intervened will find themselves trapped, and effectively shut out from university education altogether, even though they are already integrated into this country. I urge the Government to consider the full impact…”

“Even if we accept that the national security concerns about this new embassy have been mitigated, as evidenced by the letters from the security agencies today, and even if we accept that consolidating the seven properties that China owns into one gives us a security advantage, that is still cold comfort to the Hongkong…”

“I proudly declare that I will be visiting the Falkland Islands as a guest of their Government next month. What can the UK Government do to alleviate EU tariffs of between 6% and 18% on their fishing exports, so that the Falklands Government have more money to spend on health, education and their treasured environment?”

“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Jardine. I love watching fireworks, whether it is at East Ardsley cricket club, Morley rugby club for bonfire night or at the Gildersome and Drighlington Christmas lights switch-on events. They are spectacular, certainly when part of an organised display. My son Arthur…”

“Thank you, especially for the statistics. Anyone else?”

“Turning back to behaviour, which we talked about earlier. Again, when I was a teacher—head of maths—I did not lose a single maths teacher: a record I am very proud of to this day. I was the first person to leave my school and my department, and that was to do this job. One reason was that when I trained my staff, I was…”

“The January 2024 review of the Early Career Framework and Initial Teacher Training highlighted several concerns including, but not limited to, unnecessary repetition, the fact that it was not subject-specific enough, that there was excessive rigidity, there was insufficient focus on SEND, and, as we heard in the last p…”

“Sticking with the theme of retention and to plug the holes in the bucket that Daniel was talking about earlier, one reason that I stayed in teaching for eight and a half years is that I had excellent training right at the start from Teach First, the mentors in school and the NQT programme as it was known then. My quest…”

“Just before I bring Daniel in, could you elaborate on those workload issues? How do we solve that?”

“The evidence you have given today of mentors certainly lines up with the anecdotal experience I have of mentors because it certainly helped me. Just as an aside, then, before we move on to the next question, we have also heard evidence that some teachers really like it when schools say that their children can attend th…”

“I am conscious that we are 10 minutes over. Daniel, can you just finish on this point?”