Asked by: Colleen Fletcher (Labour - Coventry North East)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, if he will make an estimate of the average class size in (a) primary and (b) secondary schools in (i) Coventry North East constituency, (ii) Coventry, (iii) the West Midlands and (iv) England in each of the last five years.
Answered by Robin Walker
The department publishes annual figures on average class sizes in state-funded schools in England. The data is from the January school census and is published in ‘schools, pupils and their characteristics’ here: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/school-pupils-and-their-characteristics.
The attachment gives averages for primary and secondary class sizes for schools in Coventry North East from the 2017/18 academic year to the 2021/22 academic year. The department has calculated the figures from the published school level underlying data. The following link is for a table showing comparable figures for Coventry, the West Midlands and England over the same period: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/data-tables/permalink/e65ecbc6-9bbd-419e-8641-0abc370c7508.
Asked by: Colleen Fletcher (Labour - Coventry North East)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, if he will make an estimate of the average number of hours per week of (a) sport and (b) other physical activity that was undertaken by pupils in (i) primary and (ii) secondary schools in (A) Coventry North East constituency, (B) Coventry, (C) the West Midlands and (D) England in each of the last five years.
Answered by Will Quince
The government is committed to supporting children and young people to be active and achieve the 60 active minutes of activity recommended by the Chief Medical Officer. Sport England’s Active Lives Children and Young People Survey provides a comprehensive overview of activity levels in children across England aged 5 to 16, and years 1 to 11. This data can be accessed via the latest report, which focused on the 2020/21 academic year, and is available at: https://www.sportengland.org/know-your-audience/data/active-lives. The data can be broken down by local authority and region, but not by constituency, and includes data from the 2017/18, 2018/19, 2019/20 and 2020/21 academic years.
Asked by: Colleen Fletcher (Labour - Coventry North East)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what estimate he has made of the adequacy of the funding available for adult education courses within (a) Coventry, (b) the West Midlands and (c) England in each of the last three years.
Answered by Alex Burghart - Shadow Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster
We are continuing to invest in adult education for adults aged 19 and over through the adult education budget (AEB) (£1.34 billion in each of the 2019/20, 2020/21 and 2021/22 academic years). The AEB fully funds or co-funds skills provision for eligible adults aged 19 and above from pre-entry to level 3, to support adults to gain the skills they need for work, an apprenticeship or further learning.
Since the start of the 2019/20 academic year a proportion of the AEB has been devolved to a number of Mayoral Combined Authorities (MCA) including the West Midlands combined authority of which Coventry is a part, and the Greater London Authority (GLA) (approximately 50% of the budget was devolved in the 2019/20 and 2020/21 academic years and 60% in the 2021/22 academic year). The MCAs/GLA are responsible for the provision of AEB-funded adult education for their residents and allocation of the AEB to providers.
The AEB academic year allocations for the West Midlands are as follows:
| 2019/20 academic year | £125.6 million |
| 2020/21 academic year | £135.9 million |
| 2021/22 academic year | £131.7 million |
Asked by: Colleen Fletcher (Labour - Coventry North East)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps his Department is taking to improve social mobility in post-16 education for people in (a) Coventry North East constituency, (b) Coventry, (c) the West Midlands and (d) England.
Answered by Alex Burghart - Shadow Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster
People in Coventry, the West Midlands, and throughout England can benefit from Further Education provision and specific skills polices, which can improve the social mobility of learners.
The department wishes to ensure that more people from disadvantaged backgrounds can undertake apprenticeships. We continue to pay additional funding to employers and training providers to support them to take on young apprentices, apprentices with learning difficulties and disabilities, and care leavers. We are supporting the largest ever expansion of traineeships which are tailored to the needs of 16-24-year-olds, providing an opportunity to further develop skills.
Skills Bootcamps offer free, flexible courses of up to 16 weeks, giving people the opportunity to build up sector-specific skills and fast-track to an interview with an employer. There are several Skills Bootcamps available across Coventry and the West Midlands to support adult learners to gain in-demand skills in key sectors such as digital and HGV driving. The department will continue to expand the programme further following the announcement of £550 million additional funding at the Autumn Budget 2021.
The department is committed to ensuring that T Levels are accessible to as many students as possible. We are rolling out the T Level Transition Programme, a one-year preparatory programme that supports young people to access T Levels.
The department has implemented support in Further Education to facilitate participation by the most disadvantaged students including:
The UK Shared Prosperity Fund (UKSPF) will help to level up and create opportunity across the UK for places and people most in need. The first priority for the UK Shared Prosperity Fund will be a locally delivered new adult numeracy programme, Multiply, to help hundreds of thousands of adults improve their maths.
Asked by: Colleen Fletcher (Labour - Coventry North East)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, how much funding the Government has allocated to businesses in Coventry to support the recruitment of apprentices in each of the last three years.
Answered by Alex Burghart - Shadow Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster
In the last three financial years, available funding for apprenticeships in England has remained at around £2.5 billion. This is twice more than was spent in the 2010/11 financial year. By the 2024/25 financial year, government funding for apprenticeships will rise to £2.7 billion.
Funding is not allocated to individual areas for apprenticeships. Rather, all employers across England can access funding to offer high-quality apprenticeships to help meet their skills needs.
There were 2,010 new apprenticeship starts in the Coventry constituency in the financial year 2020/21, with 2,250 and 2,610 starts in the 2019/20 and 2018/19 respectively. The government is unable to provide a breakdown of apprenticeship spending by region as it does not publish this data.
The department is supporting employers to make greater use of their levy funds by improving the transfer system and developing more flexible models of apprenticeship delivery. This will enable more individuals and employers in all sectors to benefit from the high-quality, long-term training that an apprenticeship provides.
Asked by: Colleen Fletcher (Labour - Coventry North East)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps his Department is taking to improve the provision of mental health training for (a) schoolteachers and (b) lecturers in (i) universities and (ii) colleges.
Answered by Will Quince
The government is progressing well on its commitment to offer quality assured training to help develop all state-funded schools and colleges’ approaches to mental health and wellbeing in England by 2025. The department has invested over £9.5 million during the financial year 2021-22.
As of 14 January 2022, over 8,000 eligible schools and colleges have applied for a senior mental health lead training grant. On 8 February 2022, the government announced that an additional £3 million has been provided to extend access to training, enabling eligible parties to access training before the end of May. Information on this can be accessed here: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/improvements-seen-in-children-and-young-peoples-wellbeing.
The government provides practical ways to support schools in teaching about mental health and wellbeing through training modules. Details on the training modules can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/teaching-about-mental-wellbeing. Additionally, the department’s Leading Behaviour and Culture national professional qualification supports teachers to improve the wellbeing, motivation, and behaviour of pupils in the classroom.
Higher education providers are autonomous bodies, independent from the government. The government supports various organisations calling for universities and colleges to adopt mental health as a priority, such as Universities UK’s Stepchange and the University Mental Health Charter.
Asked by: Colleen Fletcher (Labour - Coventry North East)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps his Department is taking to help tackle inequalities in education outcomes in (a) Coventry North East constituency, (b) Coventry, (c) the West Midlands and (d) England.
Answered by Robin Walker
Enabling every child, irrespective of their background, to realise their potential at school has been at the centre of this government’s education policy since 2010. The department is committed to supporting all disadvantaged pupils in England and has put in place several significant policy measures to help schools address the barriers to success that these pupils face. Since 2011, we have been providing extra funding, £2.6 billion this year alone, through the pupil premium, for school leaders to boost the progress and attainment of their disadvantaged pupils.
Information about allocations of pupil premium at a national, local authority and parliamentary constituency level is available here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/pupil-premium-allocations-and-conditions-of-grant-2021-to-2022.
More than £6.82 million of pupil premium funding is being allocated to eligible schools in the Coventry North East constituency over the course of the 2021/22 financial year.
Schools in the Coventry local authority are being allocated pupil premium funding of nearly £18.5 million in the 2021/22 financial year. Eligible schools in the West Midlands will receive over £327 million.
To ensure schools have the tools to make effective use of this funding, the department established the £137 million Education Endowment Foundation. It carries out extensive research to produce guidance reports for schools setting out how they can use the additional funding to best improve their disadvantaged pupils’ outcomes.
In addition to protecting pupil premium funding rates, the department has announced additional funding of nearly £5 billion since June 2020 to support education recovery for children and young people in schools, colleges and early years education providers.
Recovery programmes have been designed to allow early years, school and college leaders to support those pupils most in need, including the most disadvantaged. We have also expanded our reforms in two areas where the evidence is clear that our investment will have a significant impact for disadvantaged children: high quality tutoring and great teaching.
Education recovery programmes include the Catch Up Premium and Recovery Premium, with funding worth over £1.9 billion for the 2020/21 to 2023/24 academic years. Recovery Premium allocations are based on pupil premium eligibility and can be used by schools on evidence-based activities to support those who need it most.
Schools in Coventry will receive Recovery Premium funding worth nearly £1 million over the current academic year, further helping to tackle inequalities in education outcomes.
The £1.5 billion for tutoring will allow us to provide up to 100 million tutoring hours for children and young people across England by 2024. This will expand high-quality tutoring in every part of country so that small group tuition is available to every child who needs help catching up, not just those who can afford it.
Asked by: Colleen Fletcher (Labour - Coventry North East)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what recent assessment he has made of the (a) availability and (b) affordability of early years education and childcare in (i) Coventry North East constituency, (ii) Coventry, (iii) the West Midlands and (iv) England.
Answered by Will Quince
The department monitors the sufficiency of childcare places in England through regular telephone calls and email contact with local authority early years teams. We have not seen councils reporting any substantial place supply issues, and we have not seen a substantial number of parents unable to secure a childcare place this term or since early years providers re-opened fully on 1 June 2020. Coventry City Council, which holds the statutory duty to secure sufficient childcare places in Coventry North East, is not reporting any issues with childcare places at present, as is true for the West Midlands and across England.
According to Ofsted data published on 30 November, the number of places offered by non-domestic providers on the early years register in the Coventry City Council area has remained broadly stable between August 2015 and August 2021. In addition, according to findings from the 2021 childcare and early years providers survey, across England, 7 in 10 group-based providers reported having spare places in their full day provision and almost half of childminders (49%) reported having spare capacity on average across the week. We recognise that the cost of childcare is a key concern for parents which is why the government has made an unprecedented investment in childcare over the past decade.
We have spent over £3.5 billion in each of the past three years on our early education entitlements and the government will continue to support families with their childcare costs. At the Spending Review 2021, my right hon. Friend, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, announced additional funding of £160 million in financial year 2022-23, £180 million in financial year 2023-24 and £170 million in financial year 2024-25, compared to the current financial year. For financial year 2022-23 we will increase hourly funding rates for all local authorities by 21p an hour for the 2 year old entitlement, and, for the vast majority of areas, by 17p an hour for the 3 and 4 year old entitlement. This is for local authorities to increase hourly rates paid to childcare providers and reflects cost pressures as well as anticipated changes in the number of eligible children.
There is a substantial offer in place to support parents with childcare costs. In 2021, 328,700 children had a government-funded early education entitlement place for 30 hours, worth up to £6,000. Our 2019 Childcare and Early Years Survey of Parents found that more than three quarters of parents (78%) reported having more money to spend since they started using 30 hours, and a third (33%) thought that without 30 hours they would be working fewer hours.
The department continues to explore what more can be done to help parents access childcare which suits their lives, including that which is out of hours or before or after school. We are committed to working together across government to make our current suite of offers work as effectively as possible and ensure it delivers for those parents who need it.
Asked by: Colleen Fletcher (Labour - Coventry North East)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what estimate he has made of the number of people who have begun an apprenticeship in (a) Coventry North East constituency, (b) Coventry, (c) the West Midlands and (d) England in each of the last five years.
Answered by Alex Burghart - Shadow Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster
Over five years of substantial reforms, we have made apprenticeships longer and better, with more off the job training and assessment at the end. We have introduced high quality employer designed standards, put funding on a sustainable footing through the introduction of the apprenticeship levy, and introduced the register for apprenticeship training providers to ensure apprentices receive high quality training.
Care should be taken when comparing apprenticeship start figures across years, due to the impact of these reforms, and the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak on employer recruitment.
Apprenticeship starts for Coventry North East parliamentary constituency, Coventry Unitary Authority, West Midlands Region and England in the last 5 full academic years and the first quarter of the current academic year are shown in the table below:
| ||||||
| 2016/17 | 2017/18 | 2018/19 | 2019/20 | 2020/21 | 2021/22 [1] |
Coventry North East constituency | 1,340 | 980 | 1,010 | 830 | 760 | 280 |
Coventry Unitary Authority | 3,400 | 2,400 | 2,610 | 2,250 | 2,010 | 790 |
West Midlands | 60,330 | 42,650 | 45,670 | 36,920 | 36,130 | 14,150 |
England | 494,900 | 375,800 | 393,400 | 322,500 | 321,400 | 130,200 |
[1] August to October, reported to date
Note:
Further information on apprenticeship starts can be found in the apprenticeships and traineeships statistics publication: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/apprenticeships-and-traineeships.
Asked by: Colleen Fletcher (Labour - Coventry North East)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what (a) financial and (b) other steps he is taking to help support nurseries and early years settings in (i) Coventry North East constituency, (ii) Coventry, (iii) the West Midlands and (iv) England facing disruption related to covid-19.
Answered by Will Quince
The government is providing unprecedented support to the sector across England. On 21 December 2021 an additional £102 million of financial support was announced as part of a discretionary grant to local authorities, alongside the hospitality, leisure and culture grants. It is up to individual local authorities to decide how best to use this funding, in order to support businesses which are impacted financially by COVID-19, but this can include early years (EY) providers.
In addition, the statutory sick pay rebate scheme (SSPRS) returned mid-January 2022 for COVID-related absences. This covers for up to two weeks per employee occurring from 21 December 2021 onwards. Employers will be able to claim regardless of whether they claimed under the previous scheme for the same employee. And, as well as access to the recovery loan scheme running until 30 June 2022, providers also have access to 66% relief on their business rates (nurseries discount) up until 31 March 2022. The government has announced a freeze to the business rates multiplier in financial year 2022-23, which will support all ratepayers, including EY businesses, ahead of the revaluation in 2023, and is a tax cut worth £4.6 billion to business over the next 5 years. Support is available to all providers within Coventry North East, Coventry more widely and the West Midlands, as well as across England.
In terms of additional support to nurseries across England, including Coventry North East, Coventry and the West Midlands, we have also designed a recovery programme focused on supporting practitioners and leaders backed by £180 million of funding. Within this, £17 million is to deliver the Nuffield early language intervention to improve language skills in young children around the time that they start school, £10 million is funding a second phase of the EY professional development programme to provide further coverage of early language, maths and personal, social and emotional development training to EY educators. This recovery package also includes the £153 million of funding to build a stronger, more expert workforce, enabling settings to deliver high quality teaching and address the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak on the youngest children with a focus on the most disadvantaged areas.
Within the £153 million, we will deliver a universal training offer, together with targeted support to leaders and practitioners, to create a more sustainable and self-supporting system, strengthen specialist expertise and leadership in the sector by boosting skills to develop children’s early language and maths as well as their personal and social development, improve the capacity of the EY workforce to support children with special educational needs, and train practitioners to support parents with home learning, which is one of the biggest drivers of early outcomes and future attainment.