This week I voted to pass the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill through its second reading in Parliament.

The Bill is a large and vitally important piece of legislation for children.

It will allow councils to open new schools again and work together with existing schools so that the school admissions service works better, make sure all children are taught by a fully qualified teacher and that all schools use an improved national curriculum. This should create a stronger, more accessible school system.

New breakfast clubs will be free and universal in every primary school, and there will be a cap on expensive, branded items of school uniform.

Some children are at risk of falling through the cracks. That’s why this Bill is introducing a register of children not in school. Sara Sharif could not have been so easily removed from school if this bill had been in place as she was under a child protection plan and hence the warning would have been raised.

For children at risk of entering the care system, there will be new opportunities for families to come together with professionals and make a plan to help families stay together. There will be more support for children in the care system, when they leave care and in the care of extended family and there will be a clampdown on the vast profits made by private children’s homes, which will become more accountable.

The Children’s Wellbeing & Schools Bill is the single biggest piece of child protection legislation in a generation. That is why it was shocking that the Conservatives tabled a long rambling amendment to the Bill including a national public inquiry into historical child sexual exploitation . If the amendment had been voted through, the Bill would have fallen and not progressed. That would have stopped all the safety provisions in the bill - making children less safe. The Conservatives knew that. They also knew that even had the amendment passed it would not have triggered the establishment of a national inquiry.

Jess Philips and Keir Starmer have been working to tackle abuse of children and young women for years. When the Prime Minister ran the Crown Prosecution Service he reopened historic sex abuse allegations and completely changed and improved the way they were dealt with to bust the myths and stereotypes. Numbers of prosecutions rose. He called for the reporting of abuse by anyone who discovered it to be mandatory 10 years ago when the Conservatives were in government. Nothing happened.

We have already had one national inquiry that took seven years and a number of local inquiries into these terrible child sex abuse cases. Jess Phillips is talking to victims regarding future inquiries. What we need to do now is what the chair of that national inquiry Alexis Jay suggests, and what the Conservatives did not do, and implement the measures that she recommended. The Home Secretary and the Prime Minister have set out plans to do just that very quickly so that vulnerable children are protected in future, as they always should have been.

Jayne Kirkham

Labour MP for Truro and Falmouth