I’d like to thank Liz Roberts for the invitation to speak to you all here today. Conferences like this are incredibly important, because they bring together a community of experts – all of whom are committed to making a difference to early years education, childcare and social mobility.

That’s why I want to use this opportunity today to speak to you about this Conservative Government’s vision for the early years, and what it means for the quality and outcomes for all children. Equally important, I want to thank the sector for all that you’ve done so far.

We all know that the first five years of a child’s life are critically important. They’re the foundation years that shape a child’s development, determine their readiness to learn at school, and they have an indelible influence on a child’s future.

Evidence shows that high-quality early years provision has a positive and lasting effect on children’s outcomes, future learning and life chances – regardless of the economic circumstances of their parents. Speech and language gaps appear by the age of two and early difficulties with language can affect pupils’ performance throughout primary school.

This Government is determined to close this gap, improve social mobility and extend opportunity for all. We also want to ensure that the cost of childcare is not a barrier to parents working, through our introduction of 30 hours free childcare for working parents. That’s why we will spend a record £6bn per year on childcare support by 2019/20 – more than ever before.

Furthermore, evidence shows that a high quality workforce has a major impact on children’s outcomes. We recognise that a well-qualified workforce with the appropriate knowledge, skills and experience is crucial to deliver high quality early education and childcare.

Indeed, we’ve already taken steps towards improving outcomes, and making childcare accessible and affordable to families across the country. I want to take a little time to talk about some of the things that we’ve achieved together.

We want every child to reach their full potential, and early language and literacy skills, as well as a child’s wider development, are critical to this. Good attainment in the early years puts children in the best position to start school.

Already, the latest results from the Early Years Foundation Stage Profile assessment tell us that children’s development is improving. The number of children achieving a good level of development continues to increase year on year – 71 per cent in 2017, up from 69 per cent in 2016; and from 52 per cent in 2013, when we introduced the revised Profile.

Thanks to phonics reforms, this year, over 154,000 more pupils are on track to be fluent readers than in 2012.

These improvements are a reflection of the hard work of early years and childcare providers. Now, 93 per cent of all providers – not just those delivering the free entitlements – are rated Good or Outstanding – the highest proportion ever. I am sure you’ll all agree with me that these are fantastic achievements.

However, not all children start on an even playing field. We’re committed to improving quality and outcomes for all children – regardless of background.

That’s why, over the course of 5 years, we’ll be spending over £2.5bn on the 15 hours free childcare entitlement for disadvantaged 2 year olds, and investing in the early years pupil premium, worth £300 per year per eligible child, to support better outcomes for disadvantaged 3 and 4 year-olds.

I’m proud of what we’ve achieved so far, but I know there’s more to do. This Government will continue to focus relentlessly on raising standards and supporting the critical work of teachers and early years providers across the country to ensure that the gap continues to close –as quickly as possible.

Turning specifically to the subject of accessible and affordable childcare: for those families who want to go back to work or increase their hours, but the cost of childcare just doesn’t make it viable, we’ve delivered on our promise to double the amount of free childcare for working parents of three and four year olds.

Some parents still spend over a third of their take-home pay on childcare. I recently met a father in Wolverhampton who works as a science technician in a school. He told me his wife was able to work part time and go back to study at university as a result of 30 hours, and that he could not overemphasise how much it was helping them financially and personally.

30 hours is empowering low-income families. A lone parent earning around £6,500 a year can qualify, giving these families a real helping hand. And of course, low-income families on Universal Credit can receive up to 85 per cent of childcare costs covered, and Tax-Free Childcare is worth up to £2,000 per child per year and up to £4,000 for disabled children.

The personal testimonies of how 30 hours has been a force for good in families’ lives are backed up by the evaluation of the 30 hours pilot areas, and showed that 78 per cent of parents reported greater flexibility in their working life as a result of 30 hours; whilst nearly a quarter of mothers and one in 10 fathers reported they had been able to increase their working hours.

As a key part of delivering 30 hours we want to make sure that children with special educational needs and disabilities are able to get the best from it, and our evaluation of early delivery showed that local areas which put support in place were able to successfully deliver 30 hours places for children with SEND.

We’ve put in place measures to support local areas – for example, our new Disability Access Fund, worth £615 per year per eligible child, and a requirement that local authorities establish a special educational needs Inclusion Fund.

There’s no doubt that delivering 30 hours, coupled with the implementation of funding reforms this year, has been both ambitious and – I know – challenging. I want to put on record my thanks to the sector who’ve stepped up to the plate, and worked constructively with their local authorities and our delivery partner Childcare Works to help deliver this lifeline for working families.

Moving on from 30 hours, I want to talk about what we’re doing to strengthen our workforce. It is crucial that employers are at the centre of the process for designing and delivering apprenticeships, training and qualifications. That’s why I’m very grateful to those of you who are working with the department, for example, to develop criteria for more robust level 2 and SEND qualifications for early years practitioners. We’ll be consulting on the level 2 criteria shortly.

I’m pleased to say that the level 3 apprenticeship standard, designed to support the effective development of early years staff, is nearing completion. It is also fantastic news that a task and finish group of early years stakeholders is about to begin to consider gender diversity in the sector in more depth. We believe a diverse early years workforce, which better reflects wider society, will help to enhance children’s experiences, and I look forward to discussing this with the panel.

More generally, I want to thank all employers, training providers and sector organisations who are working together – and with us – to further develop this fantastic workforce.

Looking ahead, there are some important steps that we now want to take, working with you.

Research shows that five-year-old children who struggle with language are six times less likely to reach the expected standard in English at age eleven than children who have had good language skills at five, and ten times less likely to achieve the expected level in maths. These are astonishing findings. At the Conservative Party Conference in September, we announced new actions to close the word gap further.

We will provide more funding to help schools strengthen the development of language and literacy in the early years, with a particular focus on reception. As a part of this, we’ll establish a £12m network of English Hubs in the Northern Powerhouse to spread effective teaching practice, with a core focus on early language and literacy as their first priority. We have also opened up the £140m Strategic School Improvement Fund to bids focused on evidence-based ways to improve literacy, language and numeracy during the critical Reception year.

As you know, parents have a vital role to play in their child’s development. Evidence again suggests that aside from maternal education, the home learning environment is the single biggest influence on a child’s vocabulary at age three. That is why we will use £5 million to trial evidence-based home learning environment support programmes in the North of England, focusing on early language and literacy.

We firmly believe that these new actions are decisive steps towards equipping children to reach their potential.

On 14 September, the Department for Education published the Government’s response to the public consultation on primary assessment in England.

The consultation asked how we could make the Early Learning Goals better as a measure of child development and school readiness. It showed that we need to improve the Early Years Foundation Stage Profile, for example by revising the Early Learning Goals to make them clearer and more closely aligned with teaching in Key Stage 1.

Thank you to those of you responded to our consultation. Our response as a whole confirms our intention to establish a settled, trusted primary assessment system for the long term.

We’ll be working closely with schools and early years experts as we implement changes to the Early Years Foundation Stage Profile.

This will take time – to ensure that we get it right – and we expect any changes to be rolled out nationally in the 2020 to 2021 academic year.

The Government response also set out plans for a new baseline to be developed as a statutory assessment, ready for introduction in reception by autumn 2020. The prime focus of the assessment will be on skills which can be reliably assessed and which correlate with attainment in English and mathematics at the end of Key Stage 2, and we’ll continue to discuss the detail of the assessment with a wide range of stakeholders as we develop the assessment.

Finally, I’d like to mention maintained nursery schools. They support some of the most disadvantaged children as well as often providing system leadership – leading on sharing of expertise and developing quality. That’s why, soon after I took on this role, I visited the exemplary Alice Model Nursery School in Tower Hamlets and saw the fantastic work that they’re doing, offering high quality early years education and care.

We’re committed to supporting maintained nursery schools, and have provided local authorities with supplementary funding of around £60 million a year to enable them to maintain their current levels of funding until 2019-20.

This will give them stability while we work closely with the sector and others, including the All Party Parliamentary Group on Nursery Schools and Nursery Classes, to develop our plans for the long term. I’m determined to address our shared interests and find the best way forward for maintained nursery schools.

To conclude, I am very clear that the early years is a critical time that influences outcomes for both children and their families. We have achieved a huge amount, but there is still a lot more to do, particularly to close that attainment gap. And we can’t do it without you – without the expertise and experience assembled in this room and in nurseries, childminders’ homes, schools, local authorities and parents throughout the country.

I want to thank you for your help in delivering the changes we have made in recent years, and for your support for the changes to come. Together we can continue to improve the early years system to make sure that every child improves their life chances and has real opportunities to realise their potential. Thank you very much indeed.

The Queen has been pleased to approve the following appointments:

• Penny Mordaunt MP as Secretary of State for International Development.
• Sarah Newton MP as Minister of State at the Department for Work and Pensions.
• Victoria Atkins MP as Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Home Office.

• Penny Mordaunt MP was previously Minister of State for Department for Work and Pensions
• Sarah Newton MP was previously Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Home Office.

Thank you Mr Chair,

The UK supports Estonia’s statement on behalf of the EU. Foreign Ministers of the UK, US, France and Germany made a statement last night, we will circulate it today. Others will seek to obfuscate. I am going to be brief because this is important, and it is time to be very clear.

Thanks to the OPCW-UN JIM we know what the Syrians did, and we know what Daesh did. The regime used sarin against its own people at Khan Sheikhoun on 4 April. Daesh used mustard gas in Sept 2016 at Um Hosh.

Today we should also remember what we did. The OPCW Director General set up the Fact Finding Mission in 2014 to investigate chemical weapons use in Syria. The UN Security Council set up the JIM to identify the perpetrators. We took action here last year on the basis of the JIM’s report that found the Syria had used chemical weapons on three occasions, and that Daesh had used them once. Why? Because, in the words of the Russian Representative in New York earlier this year, chemical weapons was the last taboo. This was the one Syrian issue on which the US, Russia and the rest of the UNSC was able to agree on, in the autumn of 2013, when it could agree on nothing else.

Since 2013, chemical weapons have been used not once, but many times. Sarin alone has been used to kill on at least three occasions: Ghouta 2013; Khan Sheikhoun in April 2017; and, as confirmed by the Fact Finding Mission last week, Al Ltamenah in March 2017.

So, let’s now look at what the regime and its allies have done.

a) They have failed to comply with the treaty they signed. Syria’s Declaration is still incomplete – and clearly Syria has NOT handed over all its chemical weapons stock, as it claimed to in 2014.

b) They have created the most elaborate possible, and ever changing, narrative to explain the Khan Sheikhoun attack. But the samples from Khan Sheikhoun that Syria handed to the Fact Finding Mission contained their own regime sarin signature!

c) Russia vetoed the extension of the JIM mandate, in New York just last month.

So the question for this body is what do we do now?

We should be clear, as the OPCW, that we look to the UNSC to renew the mandate of the JIM. No ifs, no buts, and no skimping on the mandate. It must be able to do its job. The perpetrators of the Al Ltamanah sarin attack must be identified. It looks to us like a horrific pattern of tactical sarin use.

The OPCW’s Fact Finding Mission must continue its work to investigate other allegations of chemical weapons use in Syria. The Declaration Assessment Team must continue to address serious outstanding concerns about Syria’s declaration. This includes very pertinent questions directly related to sarin and its precursors, and to unaccounted for aerial munitions. So:

i) We – this Executive Council, and all 41 members in it, must condemn the use of chemical weapons, clearly and unequivocally, and those who have used them as identified in the JIM mechanism that was established by unanimity. Again, no ifs, no buts.

ii) We must support further work by the FFM and the JIM, to establish facts, and hold perpetrators to account.

Russia and Iran have given us a different choice today. The text they tabled yesterday seeks to politicise the body that every country in this room is committed to support. It is a thinly veiled attack on the professional integrity of the Director General. It seeks to undermine the technical capability and competence of the Technical Secretariat.

We can, and we must do better than that. We should agree to take action, to condemn perpetrators and support the Convention. And we should do it without delay.

Already in November UK aircraft have struck Daesh command posts in Al Qaim, supporting the Iraqi Security Forces liberating the city, and eliminated mortar teams and destroyed parts of the terrorist’s tunnel network in eastern Syria. As the Defence Secretary joins counterparts in Brussels today for a meeting of the Counter-Daesh Coalition, the UK remains steadfast in its commitment to destroy Daesh militarily and to counter its poisonous propaganda.

Defence Secretary, Gavin Williamson, said:

Our forces are working tirelessly to defeat the evil of our time. Daesh is weakened and in retreat having now lost its last remaining major strongholds in Iraq and Syria.

The battle is not yet over. We will continue to hit the terrorists hard in both Syria and Iraq while supporting efforts to rebuild – only by defeating Daesh for good will we reduce the threat to both our nations at home.

In the fight for the last remaining major strongholds, the UK continued to support coalition partners fighting on the ground. Having received intelligence from a coalition surveillance aircraft on Wednesday 1 November, RAF Tornados launched two Paveways at a command post near Al Qaim destroying the building, the terrorists and their vehicles.

Tornados continued to support Iraqi Security Forces in the battle for Al Qaim the following day, and successfully bombed a Daesh observation post, which was attempting to direct mortar fire against the rapidly advancing Iraqi ground forces.

On Saturday 4 November, two Tornados patrolled the far east of Syria, destroying a mortar team north-east of al Mayadin. The aircraft also bombed the entrance to a Daesh tunnel network nearby. Typhoons flew missions over eastern Syria on Sunday 5 November, eliminating a mortar team near Abu Kamal, as well as striking another tunnel complex near Al Mayadin.

British aircraft have struck Daesh 1348 times in Iraq and 262 times in Syria. In that time the group has lost territory, finances, leaders and fighters as the 73-member coalition liberate its last remaining strongholds in both countries.

But despite military progress in Syria and Iraq, the threat posed by Daesh and their poisonous narrative remains substantial. Their continued ability to inspire attacks means that we must remain resolute in our work to defeat them in their branches worldwide and counter their propaganda.

Councils across England are set to receive a further £18 million to help alleviate pressures on local services such as housing, education and health services resulting from recent migration.

The government recognises that local authorities understand their local communities best and can identify specific pressures on services that can result from high, concentrated or short-term migration. Councils receiving these grants have developed specific plans to ease local pressures arising from migration and at the same time providing overall benefits to their wider communities.

Communities Minister Lord Bourne said:

In some places population change in a short space of time has put pressure on local services and we’re clear there are things we can do to address these problems.

This new funding will help councils rise to the challenge of reducing the impact of migration on local communities in a variety of ways – whether that’s tackling the small minority of landlords who damage neighbourhoods with overcrowded properties, providing English language classes to ensure effective integration.

The grants are the second allocations from the £100 million Controlling Migration Fund, following an initial allocation of £15 million awarded earlier this year.

Many of the projects supported will provide English language lessons to allow new residents to contribute to and feel part of their communities. They will also include education around British values and social norms, breaking down cultural barriers.

The fund is helping to ease pressures on local services but there’s still more work to do to bring net migration down further to sustainable levels. That is why government has reformed routes to the UK from outside Europe, and will get control of our borders and negotiate the right deal in the national interest in our Brexit negotiations.

Lord Bourne added:

It’s great to see so many projects tackling the problems of poor integration in their communities by, for example, allowing migrants to access the benefits of good English. This will create stronger relationships between neighbours and unlock better services for all.

Boston council in Lincolnshire will receive over £1 million to fund a wide range of integration projects, including additional sport and gym facilities where there is pressure on services, community sport sessions and encouraging volunteering from all communities.

Boston borough council Leader Councillor Michael Cooper said:

We’ve been awarded this money in recognition of the impact that migration has had locally. Our partnership will focus on doing things that our residents have told us are important to them.

We will extend the availability of advice services, enforcement capacity, community leadership and volunteering opportunities and importantly, we will support the development of English language skills to support people to communicate effectively with public services to help save time and money and increase efficiency and effectiveness.

Peterborough’s project will help new residents navigate services and provide additional capacity for the whole community. Citizen’s Advice Peterborough is receiving £288,000 to provide advice in a range of locations across the city and help an additional 4,000 clients a year from across the community.

Councillor Irene Walsh, Peterborough City Council Cabinet Member for Communities said:

We are delighted to receive this funding from the Controlling Migration Fund as it will allow even more people to benefit from the valuable service provided by Citizens Advice Peterborough in more locations across the city.

The Controlling Migration Fund is designed to support local areas facing pressures linked to recent immigration. See further details in the Controlling Migration Fund allocations table (PDF, 37.4KB, 13 pages) .

This funding will supplement local authorities’ budgets of £200 billion across the 4 year period up to 2020.

The Fund is available over the 4 years from 2016-17 to 2019-20, and is in 2 parts:

• ‘local service impacts’ totalling £100 million, led by the Department for Communities and Local Government, to help local authorities in England and their communities experiencing high and unexpected volumes of immigration to ease pressures on local services
• enforcement, led by Immigration Enforcement, worth £40 million to direct enforcement action to reduce the impact of migration on local communities; Immigration Enforcement are on track to meet their commitments under the Fund, including through supporting Rochdale’s Operation Maverick
• the government has been reviewing the available evidence on the main causes of poor integration; in the coming months we will bring forward plans for tackling these issues through a new integration strategy, to help people in more isolated communities, including migrants, to integrate into UK society