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Education: Return in January

I fear the hon. Lady has very little experience of operationalising anything, given the way she has attempted to misrepresent the efforts we have made to ensure that schools are safe and hygienic. She omitted the fact that we have delivered 350,000 CO₂ monitors to our school system. That has allowed us to be confident that, where schools are able to ventilate, they are doing so and therefore do not need the air purifiers. Where schools do need additional help, those 8,000 air purifying devices are going out as of next week, especially to special needs and alternative provision settings, which as she knows are the most vulnerable, and to all other schools that cannot mitigate the problem of ventilation in the classroom.

There has been some corroboration of that modelling by Teacher App, which I am sure the hon. Lady will look at in her own time online. If we take the 350,000 CO₂ monitors and look at the data reported back from schools and which schools have had issues, 8,000 air purifiers is a similar number to the one derived there.

The hon. Lady asked about lateral flow tests. She heard from the Prime Minister earlier that we have trebled the number of lateral flow tests going out, from 300,000 a day to 900,000 a day, and supply from 100 million a month to 300 million a month, but in her response to my statement, she unfortunately chose to traduce a testing infrastructure that is probably the best of breed in the world.

On retired teachers, again operationally, it is a bit difficult to say as we have had only one day of school. I need to wait until the end of the week at least before I can talk to the agencies and hear exactly how many teachers and temporary staff have been needed. I will happily share that information with the House, but, alas, the hon. Lady has clearly not had much experience of operationalising.

Some £5 billion is going into catch-up and there will be 6 million tutoring sessions. By any measure, that is a massive scale-up of tutoring. Half a million training opportunities will also be available—we cannot have a great education without having great teachers—and £5 billion will go into that.

The hon. Lady asked about vaccination. I can report to her that the school age vaccination programme will begin vaccinating in schools again as of Monday, as I mentioned in my statement, which she chose to ignore. Parents can also book online, go to GPs or walk-in centres to have their children vaccinated. We already have over 50% vaccinated.

Finally, on exams, vocational exams scheduled to take place in January will go ahead, because those students have worked hard studying for them and they deserve to be able to take those exams. Those who may be down with omicron and need to self-isolate will be able to get in touch with their awarding bodies and have their exam rescheduled. In the summer, we will also go ahead with exams, and rightly so, recognising that there has been much disruption to students’ studying, which is why we are doing it in two steps to go back to the rigorous grading of pre-covid pandemic levels.