Wes Streeting

The information requested falls under the remit of the UK Statistics Authority. I have therefore asked the Authority to respond.

The energy price cap will save 15 million families up to £100 on their energy bills this winter. The Government supports low-income and fuel poor households with their energy bills through the Warm Home Discount, Winter Fuel Payments and Cold Weather Payments.

In addition, the Government has announced an extra £500 million for local authorities through the new Household Support Fund to provide help to millions of the most in need.

The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (excluding its Executive Agencies) currently has 97 apprentices. The proportion of apprentices employed by the Department is 1.78%.

I refer the Hon. Member to the answer I gave him on 1 October 2020, to Question 96132.

As part of the Bounce Back Loan Scheme application process lenders undertake fraud checks, including Know Your Customer and Anti Money Laundering checks as required. In addition, the application form is clear – any individual who knowingly provides false information is at risk of criminal prosecution. We are working across Departments, and with lenders and law enforcement agencies, to tackle fraudulent abuse of the scheme.

Further details of how we expect the Bounce Back Loan Scheme to perform are set out in our accounts for 2019-20, a copy of which has been placed in the Libraries of the House. At this early stage, such estimates are naturally highly uncertain as reflected in the explanatory notes of the Accounts.

The Construction Talent Retention Scheme will support the redeployment of staff that are at risk of redundancy across the construction sector, while also enabling temporary employee loans between businesses. The Scheme will give displaced workers from other sectors a route to find new employment in construction.

This not-for-profit Scheme will be funded by the Department until the end of the current financial year, with £1.164 million having been secured. The construction industry will provide funding to support the Scheme post-March 2021.

The Summer Economic Update announced £50m to demonstrate innovative approaches to retrofitting social housing at scale, accelerating the delivery of the Social Housing Decarbonisation. This will mean warmer and more energy efficient homes and could reduce annual energy bills by hundreds of pounds for some of the poorest households, as well as lowering carbon emissions. The Programme will be UK wide and will upgrade thousands of poor energy performing social homes, with high levels of energy efficiency (e.g. floor / wall insulation) and low carbon heating (where appropriate).

In his Summer Economic Update, my Rt. Hon. Friend Mr Chancellor of the Excheqer announced a £2bn Green Home Grant scheme that will support homeowners and landlords in England to improve the energy efficiency of their properties, reducing energy bills and carbon emissions, and supporting a green economic recovery.

The funding will be spent on paying for accredited tradespeople to install a range of measures, for example insulation, to improve the energy performance of their homes. Further detail on the range of measures will be announced in the coming days, before the full launch.

An individual’s pay during their redundancy notice period is based on their rights under their contract of employment and the statutory right to notice pay.

Employees who are dismissed due to redundancy and who satisfy certain qualifying conditions are also statutorily entitled to a lump sum from their employer, based on their age, length of service and contractual weekly earnings, subject to a statutory upper limit.

While individual’s redundancy rights will depend on their contractual terms and statutory protections, the Coronavirus Job Retention scheme does not prevent an individual who is using the scheme from being placed on redundancy notice. During this difficult period, we urge employers to exercise discretion and not use the Job Retention Scheme to make someone redundant on less favourable terms than they would otherwise have received.

The Government is clear that excessive price increases exploiting the covid-19 outbreak are unacceptable. We are speaking with retailers daily and the Competition and Markets Authority has established a taskforce to tackle the issue. It has approached traders already to stop excessive price increases. Consumers and businesses should report any issues directly to the taskforce online. The Government is monitoring this situation closely and will take further action if it is necessary.

Organisations across civil society are already working tirelessly to support their communities in response to covid-19. I have had several conversations with civil society organisations about responding to covid-19 and its potential impact on charities and social enterprises. Last week the Minister for Civil Society, Baroness Barran, held a roundtable with over 45 charities to listen to their concerns. We are working with colleagues across government to shape support available to mitigate risks in the coming weeks and months and deliver effectively for communities.

The 2021 summer schools programme was part of the education recovery response to help pupils catch-up on lost education. School participation and pupil attendance were optional.

Over the summer, almost 2,800 secondary schools across England signed up to host a summer school, to help pupils catch up on lost education caused by the COVID-19 outbreak, as well as helping to improve mental health and wellbeing.

The window for claims from schools for running summer schools closed on 1 November 2021. The department is currently processing claims and analysing the figures, including numbers of attendees.

The department intends to evaluate the summer schools programme in due course, the findings of which will inform our decisions on future summer schools.

In addition to the department’s ambitious wider spending review settlement for schools and 16-19 settings; since June 2020 nearly £5 billion in education recovery funding to support children and young people recover from the COVID-19 outbreak has been announced. The department’s recovery programmes allow early years, school and college leaders to support those pupils most in need to help them catch-up. This includes the catch-up premium in the 2020/21 academic year and the recovery premium in the 2021/22 academic year. Using evidenced based interventions, this funding can also be used to tackle non-academic barriers to success in school, such as enrichment activities like arts and sport.

The department has also committed £200 million for secondary schools to deliver face-to-face summer schools in summer 2021, giving secondary pupils access to enrichment activities, such as games, music, drama and sports that they have missed out on over the COVID-19 outbreak. Almost 2,800 secondary schools across England signed up to host a summer school, this will have helped to support physical and mental health and wellbeing.

The government is committed to high-quality education for all pupils, and integral to this are the arts and music. The department provides significant funding for a range of cultural education programmes, including music, which schools can access – over £620 million between 2016 to 2021, additional to core school budgets. We confirmed £80 million funding for this financial year, 2021-22, for music programmes; and we continue to provide just over £4 million for a set of tailored arts programmes. We will continue to invest around £115 million per annum in cultural education over the next three years, though our music, arts and heritage programmes, working closely with the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, Arts Council England and others.

Alongside this, schools have continued to receive their core funding throughout the COVID-19 outbreak. The recent spending review announced that core funding for schools will rise by a further £4.7 billion by 2024-25, compared to previous plans, this builds on the largest school funding increase in a decade at the 2019 spending round.

Collectively, this will support schools to deliver a broad and ambitious curriculum and enrichment activities.

In addition to the department’s ambitious wider spending review settlement for schools and 16-19 settings; since June 2020 nearly £5 billion in education recovery funding to support children and young people recover from the COVID-19 outbreak has been announced. The department’s recovery programmes allow early years, school and college leaders to support those pupils most in need to help them catch-up. This includes the catch-up premium in the 2020/21 academic year and the recovery premium in the 2021/22 academic year. Using evidenced based interventions, this funding can also be used to tackle non-academic barriers to success in school, such as enrichment activities like arts and sport.

The department has also committed £200 million for secondary schools to deliver face-to-face summer schools in summer 2021, giving secondary pupils access to enrichment activities, such as games, music, drama and sports that they have missed out on over the COVID-19 outbreak. Almost 2,800 secondary schools across England signed up to host a summer school, this will have helped to support physical and mental health and wellbeing.

The government is committed to high-quality education for all pupils, and integral to this are the arts and music. The department provides significant funding for a range of cultural education programmes, including music, which schools can access – over £620 million between 2016 to 2021, additional to core school budgets. We confirmed £80 million funding for this financial year, 2021-22, for music programmes; and we continue to provide just over £4 million for a set of tailored arts programmes. We will continue to invest around £115 million per annum in cultural education over the next three years, though our music, arts and heritage programmes, working closely with the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, Arts Council England and others.

Alongside this, schools have continued to receive their core funding throughout the COVID-19 outbreak. The recent spending review announced that core funding for schools will rise by a further £4.7 billion by 2024-25, compared to previous plans, this builds on the largest school funding increase in a decade at the 2019 spending round.

Collectively, this will support schools to deliver a broad and ambitious curriculum and enrichment activities.

In addition to the department’s ambitious wider spending review settlement for schools and 16-19 settings; since June 2020 nearly £5 billion in education recovery funding to support children and young people recover from the COVID-19 outbreak has been announced. The department’s recovery programmes allow early years, school and college leaders to support those pupils most in need to help them catch-up. This includes the catch-up premium in the 2020/21 academic year and the recovery premium in the 2021/22 academic year. Using evidenced based interventions, this funding can also be used to tackle non-academic barriers to success in school, such as enrichment activities like arts and sport.

The department has also committed £200 million for secondary schools to deliver face-to-face summer schools in summer 2021, giving secondary pupils access to enrichment activities, such as games, music, drama and sports that they have missed out on over the COVID-19 outbreak. Almost 2,800 secondary schools across England signed up to host a summer school, this will have helped to support physical and mental health and wellbeing.

The government is committed to high-quality education for all pupils, and integral to this are the arts and music. The department provides significant funding for a range of cultural education programmes, including music, which schools can access – over £620 million between 2016 to 2021, additional to core school budgets. We confirmed £80 million funding for this financial year, 2021-22, for music programmes; and we continue to provide just over £4 million for a set of tailored arts programmes. We will continue to invest around £115 million per annum in cultural education over the next three years, though our music, arts and heritage programmes, working closely with the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, Arts Council England and others.

Alongside this, schools have continued to receive their core funding throughout the COVID-19 outbreak. The recent spending review announced that core funding for schools will rise by a further £4.7 billion by 2024-25, compared to previous plans, this builds on the largest school funding increase in a decade at the 2019 spending round.

Collectively, this will support schools to deliver a broad and ambitious curriculum and enrichment activities.

In addition to the department’s ambitious wider spending review settlement for schools and 16-19 settings; since June 2020 nearly £5 billion in education recovery funding to support children and young people recover from the COVID-19 outbreak has been announced. The department’s recovery programmes allow early years, school and college leaders to support those pupils most in need to help them catch-up. This includes the catch-up premium in the 2020/21 academic year and the recovery premium in the 2021/22 academic year. Using evidenced based interventions, this funding can also be used to tackle non-academic barriers to success in school, such as enrichment activities like arts and sport.

The department has also committed £200 million for secondary schools to deliver face-to-face summer schools in summer 2021, giving secondary pupils access to enrichment activities, such as games, music, drama and sports that they have missed out on over the COVID-19 outbreak. Almost 2,800 secondary schools across England signed up to host a summer school, this will have helped to support physical and mental health and wellbeing.

The government is committed to high-quality education for all pupils, and integral to this are the arts and music. The department provides significant funding for a range of cultural education programmes, including music, which schools can access – over £620 million between 2016 to 2021, additional to core school budgets. We confirmed £80 million funding for this financial year, 2021-22, for music programmes; and we continue to provide just over £4 million for a set of tailored arts programmes. We will continue to invest around £115 million per annum in cultural education over the next three years, though our music, arts and heritage programmes, working closely with the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, Arts Council England and others.

Alongside this, schools have continued to receive their core funding throughout the COVID-19 outbreak. The recent spending review announced that core funding for schools will rise by a further £4.7 billion by 2024-25, compared to previous plans, this builds on the largest school funding increase in a decade at the 2019 spending round.

Collectively, this will support schools to deliver a broad and ambitious curriculum and enrichment activities.

The January 2021 census will be used to determine pupil premium eligibility for alternative provision and pupil referral units for the financial year 2021-22. Pupil premium eligibility for mainstream and special schools will be based on the October 2020 census. Per pupil funding rates will be the same as in 2020-21, which is expected to increase pupil premium funding from £2.4 billion in 2020-21 to more than £2.5 billion in 2021-22 as more children have become eligible for free school meals. In addition to this, the Government announced a further £300 million for a one-off Recovery Premium which will be allocated to schools based on the same methodology as the pupil premium. In this way, schools with more disadvantaged pupils will receive larger amounts.

The Department will confirm pupil premium allocations for the financial year 2021-22 in June 2021. This will provide the public with information on the specific amounts that regions, local authorities, and schools are receiving through the pupil premium for 2021-22.

The Department publishes information on pupil premium allocations and the number of pupils eligible annually. The most recent publicly available figures can be found via this link: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/pupil-premium-allocations-and-conditions-of-grant-2020-to-2021.

Information on the change in numbers of pupils eligible for free school meals between October 2020 and January 2021 is not available because statistics are not available yet for January 2021. The information has been collected in the January school census and will be published in June 2021.

I refer the hon. Member for Ilford North to the answer I gave on 5 March 2021 to Question 160739.

The Department has provided additional funding to schools, on top of existing budgets, to cover unavoidable costs incurred between March and July 2020 due to the COVID-19 outbreak that could not be met from their budgets.

Schools were eligible to claim for funding for: increased premises related costs associated with keeping open over the Easter and summer half term holidays; support for free school meals for eligible children who were not in school, where schools were not using the national voucher scheme; and additional cleaning costs required due to confirmed or suspected COVID-19 cases, over and above the cost of existing cleaning arrangements.

To date, the Department has paid schools £138 million for all claims within the published scope of the fund, across both application windows. In the first application window we offered the opportunity for schools to flag other exceptional costs not included under the agreed categories, which were subject to further assessment. Schools applied for £42 million of additional costs which were not paid. We made it clear that we could not guarantee any claims beyond the published scope of the fund would be paid. It is reasonable for taxpayers to expect that public funding is targeted towards those who most need it. Therefore, the fund was targeted towards the costs we identified as the biggest barrier to schools operating as they needed to between March and July 2020 to support vulnerable children and children of critical workers.

Over 15,500 schools applied for funding through the exceptional costs fund, and to date we have made more than 19,000 payments from the fund. Around 450 schools did not apply for any of the eligible categories of funding and have not received payments.

The Department will publish a full breakdown of allocations from the exceptional costs fund, by school, in due course.

Data on consultancy spend against the categories a) marketing, (b) focus group, (c) polling and (d) other promotional activity is not readily available and could only be obtained at a disproportionate cost.

A transactional breakdown of spending over £25,000 is published at the links below. The reports can be filtered by Consultancy under ‘Expense Type’.

Spend reporting for Financial Year 2020 to 2021: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/dfe-and-executive-agency-spend-over-25000-2020-to-2021.

Spend reporting for Financial Year 2019 to 2020: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/dfe-and-executive-agency-spend-over-25000-2019-to-2020.

Spend reporting for Financial Year 2018 to 2019: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/dfe-and-executive-agency-spend-over-25000-2018-to-2019.

Spend reporting for Financial Year 2017 to 2018: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/dfe-and-executive-agency-spend-over-25000-2017-to-2018.

Spend reporting for Financial Year 2016 to 2017: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/dfe-and-executive-agency-spend-over-25000-2016-to-2017.

Spend reporting for Financial Year 2015 to 2016: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/dfe-and-executive-agency-spend-over-25000-2015-to-2016.

A summary of DfE Consolidated Group consultancy expenditure for each year can be found in the relevant Annual Report and Accounts, published here: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/dfe-annual-reports.

Consultants are hired to work on projects in a number of specific situations:

• where the Group does not have the required skill sets
• where the requirement falls outside the core business of civil servants
• where an external, independent perspective is required

This expertise was mainly used to support change programmes across the Group and specialist research contracted out to third parties.

The expenditure for each year is as follows:

As of Monday 8 March 2021, over 1.2 million laptops and tablets have been delivered to schools, academy trusts, local authorities and further education colleges. More information can be found here: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/laptops-and-tablets-data.

The Department publishes this data every week during term time.

Primary assessments have a crucial role in supporting pupils to grasp the basics of reading, writing and mathematics and to prepare them for secondary school. The Department is planning for a full programme of primary assessments to take place in the 2021-22 academic year. We will confirm full details for 2021-22 primary assessments in due course.

The Government remains clear that exams are the fairest method to assess pupils. We know that pupils and teachers will be working hard in preparation for GCSE and A level exams in 2022, as well as for their vocational and technical qualification exams and assessments, including BTEC examinations. We will make sure that the interests of pupils are at the centre of our considerations.

It is important that pupils in this cohort are able to get a grade safely and fairly and we will continue to monitor the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak on all pupils to ensure that those due to take exams and assessments in 2022 are supported to move to the next stage of their lives fairly. We will make further announcements in due course.

The spring 2021 census date was 21 January and the window for schools to return census data closed on Wednesday 17 February. The data collection is due to close fully following data cleaning and validation in mid-March.

Spring census data is then released annually, mainly via the four national statistics publications listed below. The weblinks refer to the publications January 2020. The release schedule for January 2021 is expected to follow similar timescales.

• Pupil absence in schools in England: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/statistics-pupil-absence last published in May 2020 relating to the Autumn 2019 term.
• Schools, Pupils and their Characteristics: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/statistics-school-and-pupil-numbers last published in June 2020.
• Special Educational Needs in England: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/statistics-special-educational-needs-sen last published in July 2020.
• Expulsions and suspensions in England: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/statistics-exclusions last published in July 2020 and note that this data is collected in arrears such that the upcoming publication will relate to the 2019/20 academic year.

A provisional publication schedule giving anticipated month of publication can be found in the gov.uk research and statistics publication calendar at: https://www.gov.uk/search/research-and-statistics?content_store_document_type=upcoming_statistics&order=release-date-oldest.