LABOUR is calling for the Government to disclose all the data it has on asbestos in schools after a major Sunday Times report suggested 20,000 still contain the potentially deadly material.
Shadow Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson told GB News: “I’ve been saying for months that the Government needs to publish the full data associated with all of this, because at the moment parents just don’t have a full understanding of what’s going on.
“The Government should come clean about the scale of the challenge in terms of what we’re facing in our schools. We haven’t had a decent school rebuilding programme since Labour was last in government and that means there is an ongoing backlog of work.
“Frankly, sometimes where money is being spent – we can’t be confident it’s being spent in the areas of the greatest need because the Government won’t tell us what they are and where they are.”
In a discussion during Breakfast with Stephen Dixon and Anne Diamond, she continued: “I mean the scale of the challenge that we see right across education is tremendous.
“That’s because for the last 30 years we haven’t had a government that’s been focused on education both in terms of driving up standards and also making sure that you should go to school in really world class facilities.
“I do believe it’s simple, that we raise the status and standing of teaching once more, that’s why I’m setting out Labour’s plans around incentive payments for new teachers when they’ve completed their two years of training.
“The last Labour government had a building schools for the future programme that transformed schools right across our country, we haven’t had anything similar from the government in recent years.”
She said Labour would also introduce a £2,400 incentive payment for new teachers: “For early career teachers, for our new teachers, when they’ve completed their early career framework, when they finish those two years, they will then receive a retention payment.
“We will make sure that children get really great outcomes and get a great start in life in school through high quality teaching and right now, at the moment, we face a recruitment and retention crisis across the profession. People are leaving teaching in their droves.”
