Delivering the Queen’s speech at the state opening of Parliament, Prince Charles announced 38 Bills, including Bills on ‘levelling up’, energy security, higher education and a schools bill. However, many measures such as encouraging all schools to join ‘strong’ multi-academy trusts and a pledge to parents to support their child if they fall behind in maths or English have already been announced by the Government.
No support for early years was mentioned within the Bills, nor was there any immediate help for families struggling with the rising cost of living. The Government’s long promised Employment Bill to make flexible working the default and protect pregnant workers, was also missed from the speech – a move criticised by the charity Working Families.
Helen Osgood, national officer at Community, the union for education and early years professionals, said, ‘Once again, the early years – vital to children’s education and development journey and desperate for more support and funding – have been overlooked and ignored. This was a missed opportunity to tackle the funding and recruitment crises.’
She went on to criticise the Schools Bill which she said ‘tinkers round the edges – legislating for things that most schools already do, and focusing on organisations and structures.’
The National Education Union claimed that the Schools Bill would be unsuccessful in ‘levelling up’ education opportunities and said that it ‘displays an alarming lack of aspiration and ambition – failing to address child poverty, Covid recovery and resolving problems of funding, as well as ignoring teacher recruitment and the retention crisis.'
Child Poverty Action Group raised concern for ‘struggling families’ due to the lack of ‘direct help’ in the speech with ‘spiralling costs’.
Chief executive Alison Garnham said, ‘With 38 bills but no direct help with spiralling costs, this speech was a far cry from what struggling families needed to hear today. Government offered no short-term comfort for parents struggling to feed their kids in the face of rocketing prices, and no long-term vision for ending child poverty.
‘Ministers must respond now to the scale of the current living costs crisis by committing to an increase in benefits in line with inflation from October. Promises on levelling up and education will go unmet while families don’t have enough money to live on – and abandoning 4 million children to a life in poverty won’t be much of a legacy either. ‘
The National Children’s Bureau (NCB) argued that to ‘truly change children’s outcomes for the better, the Government plans to remedy the corrosive cost-of-living crisis that is sweeping growing numbers of children into poverty, must go further. Rising hunger, homelessness, and families in distress is not the context in which levelling-up can succeed.’