Speeches by MacAlister.

“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Dr Huq. I thank all Members for their contributions to this important debate. Particular thanks go to my hon. Friend the Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes). I acknowledge the Select Committee’s inquiry and important work, on which I will say more in a momen…”

“I thank my hon. Friend for raising what sounds like the very important idea for Georgia’s law. I would be really delighted to hear more from her about that. If there are aspects that I can take forward with Ministers in other Departments, I will do so. Regarding information sharing, we are making big changes to set the…”

“I certainly will. The recognition is there that we need to provide a children’s social care system that is able to intuitively wrap itself around all sorts of shapes and sizes of families, who may have very different needs. Too often, the system is not able to do that, and when it fails to, problems often escalate, cos…”

“I think the logic of that point is that universities will accept three A-levels, and they will accept more than three A-levels, and they will accept an international baccalaureate. The point here is not that the international baccalaureate is the gateway to universities; it is an addition to the system and allows extra…”

“What the Conservative Government did not do was ensure that there was a fiscal position left to fund those sorts of commitments. I will give the hon. Gentleman and the previous Government credit for building on some of the excellent work that had been started under the last Labour Government around phonics, a focus on …”

“I agree that we need to ensure that opportunity goes to those who are furthest from it. My point is that this system does not provide an equal opportunity for many young people in how it is allocated at the moment. Even in institutions in the south where there are large numbers of young people frozen out of opportuniti…”

“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Roger. I thank the hon. Member for Didcot and Wantage (Olly Glover) for securing this debate and all the Members who have contributed to it. The international baccalaureate can be a fantastic qualification for young people. I commend all the staff and students in i…”

“No, I do not agree with that. Combinations of A-levels allow young people to have a wide and rich curriculum. In fact, the large programme uplift changes that we are making prioritise choices of A-levels that extend beyond the standard three, up to five, to include advanced maths and other well regarded A-level subject…”

“Jon will come in on this, but now that we have a multi-year spending review settlement, we want to give schools and responsible bodies the ability to plan ahead exactly as you described, Chair, so that they can sequence projects. I am not sure we have worked out fully yet whether that will mean we give them, as respons…”

“I appreciate that—thank you very much, Chair, and thank you to the Committee for your interest in this. I will just share some brief remarks: I am the Minister for Children and Families, with the responsibility of covering school buildings as well. Jonathan Dewsbury is the Director of Estates at the Department for Educ…”

“To set the scene, the problems that we have inherited on the school estate are fairly well known and understood. Some 43% of the estate was built in the post-war to 1980 period. Many of those buildings are close to or at the end of their intended life by this point, which leaves the Government with a major challenge in…”

“Jon will also come in on this. The rebuilding programme has done quite a lot of the heavy lifting of the capital works that have been needed for the RAAC work. The ordering of projects in SRP has been arranged around prioritising those RAAC projects.”

“When we look at the condition data collection which sets out where the whole school and college estate is, there is a significant overlap between schools that have RAAC and schools that were at the end of their intended life anyway. At Myton school, where I was last week, RAAC is not the only issue; the school is also …”

“I will come to Jon again in a moment. First, I was obviously not a Minister in the previous Government, but I am here representing the Government, and I am very happy to share reflections looking back through the paperwork and the experience of the RAAC crisis. The first few weeks and months of that process for schools…”

“I accept your point, and I accept that it has an impact on schools, which is why it is so important that we can get both, on top of the rebuilding programme, to ensure that schools that need to be wholly rebuilt are rebuilt as soon as possible and that we maintain schools before they get to that critical point, because…”

“The Government recognise that this is a major challenge. We have inherited a backlog that has worsened due to not staying on top of the crucial maintenance works. For example, with RAAC, the deterioration gets worse, resulting in leaks in roofs and so on, which means that there is a cascade effect of rundown buildings …”

“This question links to the learnings from the whole RAAC experience. One of the Government’s learnings is around our ability to communicate with responsible bodies, which was a major barrier for the last Government in resolving the RAAC crisis. The quality of communication and information going back and forth between t…”

“Very briefly, as a Minister—I do not have a reference point for this; this is my first and only experience of it—there is a fairly rapid and clear line of sight to schools where there are issues, and the Department has a grip and knows about them. In my experience over the last few weeks, when MPs have contacted me abo…”

“We have the last round of the condition data collection, CDC1, which is now a few years old, and that is why the Department is currently doing CDC2, which should be complete next year—if I am correct—in April 2026. We have sight of that already and the categorisation that comes off the back of it. We will then be shari…”

“There is a separate process on asbestos, for schools auditing the state of asbestos. We have a very good grip on that data. Jon might want to share more in a moment, but it is not the only process for understanding the state of the estate. It is to help the Government prioritise where investment should go for maintenan…”