Results 1–20 of 1000 for (in the 'Commons debates' OR in the 'Westminster Hall debates' OR in the 'Lords debates' OR in the 'Northern Ireland Assembly debates') speaker:Roger Godsiff

Petition - Closure of Heywood Crown Post Office: Parental Involvement in Teaching: Equality Act (25 Jun 2019)

Roger Godsiff: I thank the Minister for his measured and clear response to the questions I put to him. Although what he has said today may not be acceptable to other Members in this House, it will be hugely beneficial and helpful to the teachers in 256 schools in Birmingham who are now reassured that what they have been doing is, in fact, correct. I thank him for that.

Petition - Closure of Heywood Crown Post Office: Parental Involvement in Teaching: Equality Act (25 Jun 2019)

Roger Godsiff: Thank you, Mr Speaker, for the opportunity to raise the important issue of parental involvement in primary school pupils learning about the Equality Act, which was passed in 2010. The Act, which I welcomed, supported and voted for, has nine protected characteristics: age; disability; gender assignment; marriage and civil partnerships; pregnancy and maternity; race; religion or belief; sex;...

Petition - Closure of Heywood Crown Post Office: Parental Involvement in Teaching: Equality Act (25 Jun 2019)

Roger Godsiff: I will deal with that later. The relationships and sex education set out in the Children and Social Work Act does not come in until September 2020, although primary schools can introduce it a year earlier. There was also draft guidance on how the Act should be implemented, and I supported and voted for the statutory instrument associated with that guidance. This legislation builds on the...

Petition - Closure of Heywood Crown Post Office: Parental Involvement in Teaching: Equality Act (25 Jun 2019)

Roger Godsiff: I thank the hon. Member for his intervention. I cannot give him an answer because I can only refer to what is happening in Birmingham. I shall continue to refer to that. In a Westminster Hall debate on 25 February, the hon. Member for Birmingham, Ladywood referred to the fact that parents were complaining that there had been no consultation whatever about how the nine protected...

Petition - Closure of Heywood Crown Post Office: Parental Involvement in Teaching: Equality Act (25 Jun 2019)

Roger Godsiff: I have already given way on a couple of occasions. [Interruption.] Well, the hon. Member will have plenty of time to make a speech, because this debate could go on until 7 o’clock. Understandably, some parents were unhappy with the response and felt that the school had no regard for their concerns.

Petition - Closure of Heywood Crown Post Office: Parental Involvement in Teaching: Equality Act (25 Jun 2019)

Roger Godsiff: I have made it clear that I am not giving way. The parents therefore had their own meeting and, after asking the brother of one parent who is in the property business and is well educated and articulate, to be the co-ordinator, they began their protests, on which I will touch in a minute. The common theme that links these two schools is that parents at both schools were neither consulted nor...

Petition - Closure of Heywood Crown Post Office: Parental Involvement in Teaching: Equality Act (25 Jun 2019)

Roger Godsiff: I will not. The question that those who have sought to characterise the disputes at both schools as a clash of cultures should be asking is, what have the headteachers and their staff at 256 primary schools got right with the support of their parents, while in two schools it seems to have gone very wrong? I turn briefly to the protests outside the school in my constituency.

Petition - Closure of Heywood Crown Post Office: Parental Involvement in Teaching: Equality Act (25 Jun 2019)

Roger Godsiff: No, I will not. The school is in an area with a very large Muslim population. Nearly all the children who attend are from Muslim families. When the protests began outside the school in my constituency I did not take sides or make public comment. I took the view that parents of young children do not protest against their child’s school unless they have some grievance. Parents protest against...

Petition - Closure of Heywood Crown Post Office: Parental Involvement in Teaching: Equality Act (25 Jun 2019)

Roger Godsiff: There are 256 primary schools throughout Birmingham, as I said, where meetings take place all the time between parents and teachers. I do not accept the argument that there could not be parents meetings at the other two schools in Birmingham. If the headteacher or any other teachers felt that such a meeting could develop an unpleasant atmosphere, all they had to do was ask the police to be...

Petition - Closure of Heywood Crown Post Office: Parental Involvement in Teaching: Equality Act (25 Jun 2019)

Roger Godsiff: I have given way a lot, but I will in a moment. After each demonstration, the parents had email correspondence with the police superintendent to seek written confirmation that the police were satisfied with the way the protest had been conducted and they asked each time whether any arrests had taken place or cautions been issued. I have seen copies of the email correspondence and confirmation...

Petition - Closure of Heywood Crown Post Office: Parental Involvement in Teaching: Equality Act (25 Jun 2019)

Roger Godsiff: I have given way on many occasions. I told the protesters this and I also told them that they had made their point and that the protests should end. I reiterated this when they came to see me at my surgery, which was filmed on phone camera and put into the public domain in an abridged version. [Interruption.]

Petition - Closure of Heywood Crown Post Office: Parental Involvement in Teaching: Equality Act (25 Jun 2019)

Roger Godsiff: I am obliged to you, Mr Speaker. I have to say that the breakdown in trust between the headteacher and the parents has not been helped by certain tweets that the headteacher has put out. She is, of course, perfectly entitled to tweet what she wants to, as is everybody else, but to call parents who are participating in highly organised police-supervised protests a “mob” which needs to be...

Petition - Closure of Heywood Crown Post Office: Parental Involvement in Teaching: Equality Act (25 Jun 2019)

Roger Godsiff: I do not have children attending schools in Birmingham. My children are grown up, and I have a grandchild who is not in Birmingham. It is not for me to pass judgment on the concerns of parents.

Petition - Closure of Heywood Crown Post Office: Parental Involvement in Teaching: Equality Act (25 Jun 2019)

Roger Godsiff: I will not give way anymore. If parents say they have concerns, and if they have sought to raise those concerns with the headteacher and have not been allowed to do so, I believe it is incumbent on a Member of Parliament to articulate those concerns. That does not mean to pass judgment, but if they have concerns, they are entitled to have them addressed. So far as the parents at these two...

Petition - Closure of Heywood Crown Post Office: Parental Involvement in Teaching: Equality Act (25 Jun 2019)

Roger Godsiff: No, I have given way on a lot of things. Furthermore, the police who were present wore body cameras and were asked by the organisers of the protest to check whether any placards contravened the law. I understand that only one placard was deemed inappropriate at an early protest, and the people carrying the banner were told not to bring it again. I make these points because I believe the...

Petition - Closure of Heywood Crown Post Office: Parental Involvement in Teaching: Equality Act (25 Jun 2019)

Roger Godsiff: I will come to that point in a minute. The parents want clarification. First, they want to know whether it is permissible for headteachers to partner with parents to decide how the nine protected characteristics are imparted to pupils, bearing in mind that parents cannot have any veto over which characteristics are taught. Secondly, they would like to know whether the nine protected...

European Union (Withdrawal) Act: 1st Allotted Day ( 4 Dec 2018)

Roger Godsiff: Thank you, Mr Speaker, for the opportunity to speak in this momentous debate, which will determine the direction of our country for decades to come. I strongly support our system of representative democracy, whereby electors send their representatives to Parliament to exercise their judgment and then to vote as they think fit, whereas referendums are, as far as I am concerned, direct...

Football: Safe Standing — [Mr Laurence Robertson in the Chair] (25 Jun 2018)

Roger Godsiff: I congratulate the hon. Member for Thornbury and Yate (Luke Hall) on initiating the debate. In the late 1990s, I initiated a similar debate and introduced a private Member’s Bill, which the Government of the day, in their wisdom, talked out. I hope that the hon. Gentleman has better luck with his current campaign. Every week, hundreds of thousands of people attend football matches in...

Early Parliamentary General Election (19 Apr 2017)

Roger Godsiff: I, too, will be voting against the motion today, because it is totally unnecessary. I say that as somebody who voted leave on 23 June last year and who has had a grudging respect for how the Prime Minister has conducted herself since she took over. However, her justification for holding a general election is quite frankly disingenuous. To suggest that she needs a mandate to negotiate Brexit...


1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 > >>

Create an alert

Advanced search

Find this exact word or phrase

You can also do this from the main search box by putting exact words in quotes: like "cycling" or "hutton report"

By default, we show words related to your search term, like “cycle” and “cycles” in a search for cycling. Putting the word in quotes, like "cycling", will stop this.

Excluding these words

You can also do this from the main search box by putting a minus sign before words you don’t want: like hunting -fox

We also support a bunch of boolean search modifiers, like AND and NEAR, for precise searching.

Date range

to

You can give a start date, an end date, or both to restrict results to a particular date range. A missing end date implies the current date, and a missing start date implies the oldest date we have in the system. Dates can be entered in any format you wish, e.g. 3rd March 2007 or 17/10/1989

Person

Enter a name here to restrict results to contributions only by that person.

Section

Restrict results to a particular parliament or assembly that we cover (e.g. the Scottish Parliament), or a particular type of data within an institution, such as Commons Written Answers.

Column

If you know the actual Hansard column number of the information you are interested in (perhaps you’re looking up a paper reference), you can restrict results to that; you can also use column:123 in the main search box.