Question to the Department for Education:

To ask His Majesty's Government when the final Cass report will be published; and how recommendations from this report will be consolidated into the consultation on the Government’s Guidance for Schools and Colleges: Gender Questioning Children, published on 19 December 2023.

Answered by Baroness Barran - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Education)

The Cass Review is an independent review of NHS provision and is responsible for its own timetable. It is not directly considering practice in schools. The aim of the review is to ensure that children and young people who are questioning their gender identity or are experiencing gender dysphoria, and who need NHS support, receive a high standard of care that meets their needs and is safe, holistic and effective.

On 19 December 2023, the department published draft guidance for consultation. This consultation will run for twelve weeks and closes at 11:59pm on March 12 2024. The guidance applies to schools and colleges.

Once the consultation closes, the department will assess the responses before finalising the guidance for publication. Ministers and officials have engaged with the Cass Review to understand the latest evidence and will continue to do so. This includes reflecting any relevant evidence and conclusions from the final report in the guidance should the timetable allow to do so.

Question to the Department for Education:

To ask His Majesty's Government why the Department for Education maintains named individuals' religious affiliation, sexual orientation, gender identity, and disability information from Higher Education equality monitoring data, rather than retaining the information as anonymised statistics.

Answered by Baroness Barran - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Education)

The department does not directly collect information from higher education institutions concerning the religious affiliation, sexual orientation, gender identity or disability of students. However, the department does receive these variables from Jisc (and previously the Higher Education Statistics Authority) as part of the student records that they share with the department.

The information is held at a named level to enable this data to effectively function as a longitudinal research source, which can be used to compare educational pathways with other (non-educational) outcomes later in life. This will provide an evidence base against which society can evaluate and monitor the impact of education and training on outcomes and support government decision-making to improve services and ensure equality of opportunity for all irrespective of background or circumstances.

While individual identifiers are retained by the department for matching purposes, at all times the department will minimise the processing of, and access to, instant or meaningful identifiers. Access to named data within the department is restricted to a small number of data professionals with responsibility for matching this data with other sources and creating pseudonymised, or aggregated, versions of the data which are subsequently used for research and statistics.