Asked by: Esther McVey (Conservative - Tatton)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment her Department made of the adequacy of the use of single unique identifiers for schools, in the context of the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill.
Answered by Georgia Gould - Minister of State (Education)
Provision in the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill to introduce a single unique identifier (SUI) for children is based on extensive user research, including engagement with schools and education settings. Our 2023 report, ‘Improving multi-agency information sharing’, highlighted that while schools use identifiers such as the unique pupil number (UPN), these are not recognised across other agencies that process and share information relating to safeguarding and welfare, creating fragmentation and risk.
To address this, the department began pilot activity in April 2025 to test the feasibility of using the NHS number as a consistent identifier within health and children’s social care. Future piloting will test this across wider safeguarding partners, including education. The intention is not to replace identifiers that are currently used in education, but to design how the SUI can work alongside existing identifiers to improve information sharing and strengthen safeguarding.
Asked by: Esther McVey (Conservative - Tatton)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps her Department is taking to ensure provisions in the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill maintain data protection requirements.
Answered by Georgia Gould - Minister of State (Education)
The department recognises its responsibility to ensure the highest standards of data privacy and transparency in respect of personal data, and we are ensuring that this is prioritised as the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill progresses.
We are ensuring that measures outlined in the Bill align with data protection principles, as set out in the Data Protection Act 2018, UK General Data Protection Regulations (UK GDPR) and the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025.
The department has met its obligation under Article 36(4) of UK GDPR to consult with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) on all measures involving the use of personal data. We continue to engage with the ICO for measures relating to the single unique identifier and the children not in school.
The department is engaging with the ICO to ensure that data protection risks identified are properly mitigated and will publish summaries of the assessments once they are complete.
Asked by: Esther McVey (Conservative - Tatton)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what consultation her Department undertook with parents of home educated children on the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill.
Answered by Josh MacAlister - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Education)
The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill includes a proposal for compulsory Children Not in School registers and an accompanying duty on parents to give information for these registers. The department consulted on this proposal as part of its ‘Children Not in School’ consultation, which ran between April and June 2019. The consultation received almost 5,000 responses, 74% of which were from parents and young people.
Asked by: Esther McVey (Conservative - Tatton)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, with reference to the Answer of 4 September 2025 to Question 69839 on Schools: Employers' Contributions, how the the £1 billion of support o schools was calculated; and what the total current cost is of the increase in employers' National Insurance contributions to date.
Answered by Georgia Gould - Minister of State (Education)
The department is providing mainstream schools and high needs settings with over £930 million to support with the increases to employer National Insurance contributions (NICs) from April 2025. We are also providing £25 million in respect of schools with early years provision and £155 million for post-16 schools and academies and further education colleges. Taken together, this is an increase of over £1.1 billion. This funding is designed to provide schools with support to manage NICs pressures. We recognise that the balance between funding and costs will vary between schools.
The amount of public sector support was based on an estimate of the proportion of employer NICs receipts paid by public sector organisations, using the Office for National Statistics (ONS) classification of the public sector boundary. HM Treasury routinely uses the ONS classification of the public sector boundary, for example in relation to public sector spending, borrowing and debt.
This funding was then allocated to departments based on a weighted average of the headcount and wage/salary data that all departments submitted to HM Treasury.
Our funding system is not designed so that every school and college receives funding that fully matches their precise spending, as spending, including NICs costs, varies across institutions because of the decisions each takes on its staffing.
Asked by: Esther McVey (Conservative - Tatton)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, pursuant to the Answer of 4 September 2025 to Question 69839 on Schools: Employers' Contributions, how much and what proportion of the cost of the increase in employers' National Insurance Contributions will be covered by the £1 billion additional funding that will be provided.
Answered by Georgia Gould - Minister of State (Education)
The department is providing mainstream schools and high needs settings with over £930 million to support with the increases to employer National Insurance contributions (NICs) from April 2025. We are also providing £25 million in respect of schools with early years provision and £155 million for post-16 schools and academies and further education colleges. Taken together, this is an increase of over £1.1 billion. This funding is designed to provide schools with support to manage NICs pressures. We recognise that the balance between funding and costs will vary between schools.
The amount of public sector support was based on an estimate of the proportion of employer NICs receipts paid by public sector organisations, using the Office for National Statistics (ONS) classification of the public sector boundary. HM Treasury routinely uses the ONS classification of the public sector boundary, for example in relation to public sector spending, borrowing and debt.
This funding was then allocated to departments based on a weighted average of the headcount and wage/salary data that all departments submitted to HM Treasury.
Our funding system is not designed so that every school and college receives funding that fully matches their precise spending, as spending, including NICs costs, varies across institutions because of the decisions each takes on its staffing.
Asked by: Esther McVey (Conservative - Tatton)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what estimate she has made of the cost to schools of increases in employers' National Insurance contributions over the next four years.
Answered by Catherine McKinnell
The department is providing almost £1 billion to support schools with the increases to employer National Insurance contributions (NICs) from April 2025. The department publishes the schools’ costs technical note, which provides an annual assessment of schools’ costs and funding, including the impacts of employer NICs. The most recent publication covers the 2024/25 and 2025/26 financial years, and later financial years will be included in future publications.
Asked by: Esther McVey (Conservative - Tatton)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, how many staff network events took place in her Department in May 2025; and what the names of those events were.
Answered by Janet Daby
Staff networks are collaborative volunteer networks, organised by staff themselves rather than the department. As a result, events are organised by staff themselves, not the department. We are aware of the following events that these networks organised in May 2025.
In May 2025, four staff network events were held in the department as part of Dementia Week. The events were:
Asked by: Esther McVey (Conservative - Tatton)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, whether her Department has updated guidance on the use of single-sex facilities in response to the Supreme Court judgement in the case of For Women Scotland v The Scottish Ministers of 16 April 2025.
Answered by Janet Daby
The department will review and update policy wherever necessary to ensure it complies with the latest legal requirements. We aim to ensure appropriate facilities are available for all staff.
Asked by: Esther McVey (Conservative - Tatton)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps his Department is taking to support children who were entering the school system at the time of the first lockdown.
Answered by Nick Gibb
The COVID-19 pandemic created a unique challenge for teachers, school staff, students and families, particularly for those children who were starting school at the time of the first lockdown. The Department has focused on addressing the effects of the pandemic and the challenges it created in order to improve outcomes for children. The Department’s strategy is focused on ensuring all children can access a high quality education, by providing excellent teachers, high standards and well evidenced, targeted interventions.
To support pupils, the Department has provided significant funding to the Core Schools Budget and is supporting schools to offer well evidenced interventions which are targeted at those most in need. Almost £5 billion was made available for recovery, funding an ambitious multi year programme that includes direct funding to schools, teacher training, and tailored tutoring.
The Department continues to provide support for younger pupils’ literacy. In July 2023, the Department published an updated version of the Reading Framework, providing teachers and school leaders with evidence informed guidance on good practice in reading. It has been expanded from reception and Key Stage 1 to cover Key Stage 2 and 3, to help schools improve reading for all pupils and support them to engage confidently with reading at secondary school. This is on top of the Department’s wider efforts to give children a strong foundation in reading through the phonics screening check, support for phonics and the work of English Hubs. England came fourth out of 43 comparable countries in the recent PIRLS international survey, and scored significantly above the international and European averages, making it the highest performing country in the western world.
This is supplemented by targeted interventions for those in need. The National Tutoring Programme (NTP) allocates funds to schools based on rates of disadvantage. Since the launch of the NTP in November 2020, nearly four million tutoring courses have been started to date. In addition, the Department’s Accelerator Fund (2021/22), supports the rollout of well evidenced literacy and numeracy programmes in schools, through English Hubs and Maths Hubs.
On top of this, this year’s school funding will total over £57.7 billion. Including the additional funding for teachers’ pay, funding for both mainstream schools and high needs is £1.8 billion higher in 2024/25 compared with 2023/24. The overall Core School Budget will total over £59.6 billion in 2024/25. This is the highest ever level in real terms per pupil, as measured by the Institute of Fiscal Studies.
Asked by: Esther McVey (Conservative - Tatton)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, whether he has had discussions with the Secretary of State for Levelling up Housing and Communities on the improving the speed of Local Authorities producing Educational, Health and Care plans.
Answered by Claire Coutinho - Shadow Minister (Equalities)
The Department for Education has met with the Department for Levelling up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC) at ministerial level to discuss all aspects of the Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) and Alternative Provision (AP) policy, including Education Health and Care (EHC) plan reform. The department is acting to improve the SEND and AP system and works closely with our counterparts in DLUHC and other government departments on this as necessary.
In the SEND and AP Improvement Plan, published in March 2023, the department set out plans to reform the EHC plan system.
The SEND and AP reforms seek to make best practice common practice in how EHC plans are delivered. They include establishing a single EHC plan form and supporting processes across England, including developing digital requirements for EHC plan systems to improve consistency and access to information. The department will also test the use of multi-agency panels to enable local authorities to make judgements based on a holistic view of the needs of the child or young person across education, health and care when deciding whether to issue an EHC plan. We are already engaging with children, young people, families, and practitioners to develop this work.
The department wants to ensure that EHC plans, where required, are issued as quickly as possible, so that the child or young person can access the support they need. In 2022 (the latest figures available), there were 114,457 requests for an EHC plan. 66,244 new EHC plans were issued, the highest number since they were introduced. 49.1% were issued within 20 weeks.
The department recognises the vital role local authority staff play in supporting families in the SEND and EHC plan system. We will consider the skills and training these staff require and, when consulting on amending the SEND Code of Practice, will propose new guidance on delivering a responsive and supportive casework service.
Where a council does not meet its duties, we do not hesitate to take action that prioritises children’s needs and brings about rapid improvement.