Speeches by Hayes.

“I agree with everything that the hon. Member said. It is vital that such badly needed aid is allowed to enter Gaza unrestricted, and that we recognise that that process will need to continue for the foreseeable future because the situation is so desperate and the recovery will be long. But the recovery cannot begin wit…”

“It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Ms Butler. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for North Ayrshire and Arran (Irene Campbell) for opening this important debate. I also thank the 1,351 residents of my constituency for signing the petition, a number that speaks to the extent of distress and concern that they feel …”

“As I said, I agree that aid should be allowed into Gaza unfettered. That should be administered by the UN and by aid agencies that are well able to determine with Palestinians what supplies are needed. Does the Minister agree that it is unacceptable to deny the children of Gaza their right to education, and that it is …”

“The Foreign Secretary spoke in her statement of Israeli restrictions strangling the Palestinian economy. These are not restrictions; they are strategic attempts to undermine the viability of Palestine by illegal settlement, harassment, intimidation, murder and displacement of Palestinians from their land. Illegal settl…”

“I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this important debate. Care leavers need support; they need the state to deliver for them when family is sometimes not there in the way that it is for many young people. Does she agree with me and my Select Committee that we need to iron out the differences in support for care …”

“I thank all hon. Members for contributing to this debate on a Thursday afternoon. For the benefit of anybody watching these proceedings externally, I should say that Thursday afternoons are a challenging time for hon. Members, when many of them have constituency commitments. The debate has therefore been characterised …”

“I beg to move, That this House has considered the Fourth Report of the Education Committee, Children’s social care, HC 430, and the Government response, HC 1350. It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Dr Huq. I am grateful to the Liaison Committee for granting time for this debate on the Education Committee’s report…”

“On the work on extra-familial harms, what engagement is the Minister having with colleagues in the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government? That very much reflects my perspective as a constituency MP and the heartbreaking cases I have seen in my constituency, where a family needed to move due to an extra…”

“On the basis of your research, what would a truly ambitious approach to tackling child poverty look like? It seems to me that we are talking about how to get over a certain baseline. Given the way that poverty is measured, when we talk about lifting children out of poverty we are actually talking about lifting them fro…”

“Thank you for having me, Chair. Professor Stewart, I want to drill down into your example about Sure Start evaluation. That shows very clearly, 20 or so years on, that children who lived in close proximity to a Sure Start centre achieved better GCSE results and that there was a direct link between the presence of Sure …”

“I am not saying that relieving the two-child limit would not be transformative—I think it would be—but I think we would still essentially be seeing lots of children living in households with very low levels of income, albeit above a technical definition of poverty. What I am interested in is this. If we accept the base…”

“I am not going to take any further interventions. The international baccalaureate is an important part of the landscape, and I am pleased that the Government have confirmed that all schools can continue to offer it if they wish, but the bigger challenge for the Government is to ensure that there is excellence and enric…”

“I think the Government are right to focus on how to improve education for every young person. If the hon. Member will bear with me, I will come on to some wider points about the importance of the IB, and the features of the IB that should be applicable more widely across the education sector. We need to be clear that w…”

“It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Sir Roger. I congratulate the hon. Member for Didcot and Wantage (Olly Glover) on securing this important debate. Post-16 education is a vital stage of a young person’s life. Whether they are following an academic, vocational or technical pathway, it is the stage at which they …”

“If the hon. Gentleman will bear with me, I will elaborate on consultation and engagement in a moment, but I encourage Liberal Democrat Members to reflect on the role that their own Government played in the shockingly deep cuts to 16-to-19 education across the board from 2010, and the implications of those decisions in …”

“My Committee’s recent report on further education and skills highlights the poor amount of information on vocational and technical training opportunities, including apprenticeships, available to young people while they are in school. We recommend that UCAS be expanded to provide a single portal for information on acade…”

“6. What steps he is taking with Cabinet colleagues to help ensure that post-16 education provides the necessary skills to support the economy.”

“Fundamentally, we are talking about relationships in this debate, particularly between schools and parents. The best way to build strong relationships is not through punitive measures. We need to properly resource schools, through the wider policy work of Government, to rebuild the relationships that were so damaged by…”

“I have not mentioned fines, but I agree that fining parents is a very flawed area of policy. I do not want to say it is always entirely the wrong thing to do, but fines are not a particularly effective mechanism for discouraging parents from removing their children from school for a holiday. The cost of a fine is almos…”

“It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Ms Lewell. I start by recognising the strength of feeling on term-time absences from school, particularly among the almost 182,000 people who signed the petition. Family life is precious, and there are so many pressures bearing down on families that serve to make time spent tog…”