Asked by: Andrew Selous (Conservative - South West Bedfordshire)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, whether her Department operates a ban the box employment policy in respect of ex-offender job applicants with unspent convictions; and how many employees of her Department have unspent convictions.
Answered by Caroline Dinenage
The Department for Education’s recruitment policies are fully compliant with the Ban the Box initiative. The Department does not hold information about how many employees have unspent convictions.
Asked by: Andrew Selous (Conservative - South West Bedfordshire)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, if she will make it her policy not to impose the apprenticeship levy on small schools; and for what reasons large academies are not required to pay that levy.
Answered by Robert Halfon
The levy is being introduced to fund a step change in apprenticeship numbers and quality. All employers in England, including schools, can use the funds raised by the levy for apprenticeship training and assessment, getting valuable skills for their organisations. Levying all employer paybills over £3m, including those in the education sector, is considered to be the simplest, fairest and most objective way of doing this.
For academies, the trust is the employer and single academies or multi-academy trusts with a paybill of over £3m will pay the apprenticeship levy. For foundation and voluntary aided schools, the governing body is the employer. For community and voluntary controlled schools, the local authority is the employer.
This means that, for community and voluntary controlled schools, the local authority will pay the levy, rather than the school. The local authority may pass these costs on to the school but they will also be able to pass on the benefits - giving the school access to digital funds to pay for apprenticeship training.
Asked by: Andrew Selous (Conservative - South West Bedfordshire)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, if she will amend her Department's definition of sparsity in school funding criteria to specify that a school less than three miles from another school is not classed as a rural school.
Answered by Nick Gibb
The Government is committed to supporting small and remote schools which, due to their location, do not necessarily have the same opportunities to work as efficiently as other schools. 63% of respondents to our stage 1 schools national funding formula (NFF) consultation agreed with our proposal to include a ‘sparsity’ factor to target additional funding to schools that are small and remote. The Government’s response to the first stage NFF consultation is available here: https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/schools-national-funding-formula.
We are now consulting on proposals for the amount of sparsity funding that eligible schools should receive. Under our proposals, small and remote schools would receive £27 million of funding through the sparsity factor, and 676 schools that do not currently receive any sparsity funding from their local authority would start to receive this funding. The second stage consultation runs until 22 March 2017 and the documentation can be found at: https://consult.education.gov.uk/funding-policy-unit/schools-national-funding-formula2/.
We will make final decisions on the national funding formula following the conclusion of the consultation.
Asked by: Andrew Selous (Conservative - South West Bedfordshire)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment she has made of the effectiveness of elective home education for children from the traveller community; how many of those children achieved five or more GCSEs including English and mathematics at grade A* to C in the last academic year; how many of such children went to university in each of the last three years; and if she will make a statement.
Answered by Caroline Dinenage
As there is no registration requirement for home educated children, overall numbers are not known and no general assessment of the effectiveness of home education for Traveller children can be undertaken. As part of their duty to identify children who are not receiving suitable education, local authorities work with Traveller communities to ensure that children are either being educated at home effectively, or attend school.
The Department publishes statistics on the attainment of pupils from Traveller of Irish heritage backgrounds and their destinations after the end of key stage 4 and key stage 5, but these only cover pupils and students who attend state-funded schools and colleges and not those who are electively home educated.
Asked by: Andrew Selous (Conservative - South West Bedfordshire)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what his policy is on career colleges.
Answered by Elizabeth Truss
The Government's policy for career colleges is the same as for any other further education college that enrols 14- to 16-year-olds. The Education Funding Agency first needs to grant permission for the college to enrol 14- to 16-year-olds, and permission is restricted to colleges with a Good or Outstanding Ofsted rating.
The proposals set out by the Career College Trust, an independent charity, take advantage of the flexibilities and freedoms of the funding reforms introduced by this Government to provide an alternative approach to offering high quality academic and vocational education from age 14.
I await with interest developments in career colleges and other innovative schemes for 14-19 provision, which have arisen as a result of the Government's vocational education reforms.