Asked by: Lord Field of Birkenhead (Crossbench - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps his Department is taking to monitor the adequacy of the number of Teachers of the Deaf.
Answered by Nadhim Zahawi
The funding made available through the new Department for Education contracts covers a wide range of activity designed to support the education workforce, support families, and support local authorities and their partners. Within this, £3.4 million has been provided for the special educational needs and disability (SEND) Schools’ Workforce contract, a strand of which is a study to understand the supply, demand and drivers for SEND continuing professional development (CPD). Also included is an exercise to map access to CPD and an analysis of the gaps in training and resources available to schools. The aim of the contract is to ensure that all teachers are equipped to respond to the needs of their pupils, including those with hearing impairment.
Supporting teachers of pupils with sensory impairment is part of the contract, but direct funding for Teachers of the Deaf is not included in this activity and the department does not fund the training of Teachers of the Deaf. It is up to local authorities to work with the schools in their area to identify the nature of specialist support services they commission according to the needs of schools in their authority. The SEND Code of Practice makes clear that all local authorities are required to publish a local offer, which sets out information about provision they expect to be available for children and young people with SEND in their area. The local offer must include relevant regional and national specialist provision, such as provision for children and young people with low-incidence and more complex special educational needs (SEN).
Under the SEND Schools’ Workforce contract, eight regional hubs will be created, consisting of a Regional and Deputy Regional SEND Leader in each region. Their role is to identify and bring together local SEND networks and to support school improvement, including condition specific networks. As part of that work, they will make links with the SEND leads in local authorities and will use those discussions to identify weaknesses and priorities for school improvement in the area.
Our work with the whole school SEND programme will help us understand the gaps in training and resources available to schools to support pupils with SEND, including the needs of mainstream schools to support pupils with hearing impairments. As we review the conclusions of that analysis, we will also consider the information received from the National Deaf Children’s Society on trends in the recruitment of Teachers of the Deaf.
The department is reviewing recruitment and retention data to understand whether special schools and alternative providers are facing teacher shortages and how this compares to mainstream teaching as part of a wider focus on teacher recruitment and retention.
Asked by: Lord Field of Birkenhead (Crossbench - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, pursuant to the Answer of 11 September 2018 to Question 169059 on Pupils: Hearing Impairment, whether the new SEND regional leads have been tasked with engaging with local authority specialist education services for deaf children.
Answered by Nadhim Zahawi
The funding made available through the new Department for Education contracts covers a wide range of activity designed to support the education workforce, support families, and support local authorities and their partners. Within this, £3.4 million has been provided for the special educational needs and disability (SEND) Schools’ Workforce contract, a strand of which is a study to understand the supply, demand and drivers for SEND continuing professional development (CPD). Also included is an exercise to map access to CPD and an analysis of the gaps in training and resources available to schools. The aim of the contract is to ensure that all teachers are equipped to respond to the needs of their pupils, including those with hearing impairment.
Supporting teachers of pupils with sensory impairment is part of the contract, but direct funding for Teachers of the Deaf is not included in this activity and the department does not fund the training of Teachers of the Deaf. It is up to local authorities to work with the schools in their area to identify the nature of specialist support services they commission according to the needs of schools in their authority. The SEND Code of Practice makes clear that all local authorities are required to publish a local offer, which sets out information about provision they expect to be available for children and young people with SEND in their area. The local offer must include relevant regional and national specialist provision, such as provision for children and young people with low-incidence and more complex special educational needs (SEN).
Under the SEND Schools’ Workforce contract, eight regional hubs will be created, consisting of a Regional and Deputy Regional SEND Leader in each region. Their role is to identify and bring together local SEND networks and to support school improvement, including condition specific networks. As part of that work, they will make links with the SEND leads in local authorities and will use those discussions to identify weaknesses and priorities for school improvement in the area.
Our work with the whole school SEND programme will help us understand the gaps in training and resources available to schools to support pupils with SEND, including the needs of mainstream schools to support pupils with hearing impairments. As we review the conclusions of that analysis, we will also consider the information received from the National Deaf Children’s Society on trends in the recruitment of Teachers of the Deaf.
The department is reviewing recruitment and retention data to understand whether special schools and alternative providers are facing teacher shortages and how this compares to mainstream teaching as part of a wider focus on teacher recruitment and retention.
Asked by: Lord Field of Birkenhead (Crossbench - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, pursuant to the Answer of 11 September 2018 to Question 169059 on Pupils: Hearing Impairment, what proportion of that funding has been made available to the recruitment and retention of Teachers of the Deaf.
Answered by Nadhim Zahawi
The funding made available through the new Department for Education contracts covers a wide range of activity designed to support the education workforce, support families, and support local authorities and their partners. Within this, £3.4 million has been provided for the special educational needs and disability (SEND) Schools’ Workforce contract, a strand of which is a study to understand the supply, demand and drivers for SEND continuing professional development (CPD). Also included is an exercise to map access to CPD and an analysis of the gaps in training and resources available to schools. The aim of the contract is to ensure that all teachers are equipped to respond to the needs of their pupils, including those with hearing impairment.
Supporting teachers of pupils with sensory impairment is part of the contract, but direct funding for Teachers of the Deaf is not included in this activity and the department does not fund the training of Teachers of the Deaf. It is up to local authorities to work with the schools in their area to identify the nature of specialist support services they commission according to the needs of schools in their authority. The SEND Code of Practice makes clear that all local authorities are required to publish a local offer, which sets out information about provision they expect to be available for children and young people with SEND in their area. The local offer must include relevant regional and national specialist provision, such as provision for children and young people with low-incidence and more complex special educational needs (SEN).
Under the SEND Schools’ Workforce contract, eight regional hubs will be created, consisting of a Regional and Deputy Regional SEND Leader in each region. Their role is to identify and bring together local SEND networks and to support school improvement, including condition specific networks. As part of that work, they will make links with the SEND leads in local authorities and will use those discussions to identify weaknesses and priorities for school improvement in the area.
Our work with the whole school SEND programme will help us understand the gaps in training and resources available to schools to support pupils with SEND, including the needs of mainstream schools to support pupils with hearing impairments. As we review the conclusions of that analysis, we will also consider the information received from the National Deaf Children’s Society on trends in the recruitment of Teachers of the Deaf.
The department is reviewing recruitment and retention data to understand whether special schools and alternative providers are facing teacher shortages and how this compares to mainstream teaching as part of a wider focus on teacher recruitment and retention.
Asked by: Lord Field of Birkenhead (Crossbench - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, if he will make an assessment of the potential merits of allocating unused monies from the free 15 hours childcare offer for disadvantaged two-year-olds, to develop an intensive programme of home visiting focused on improving school readiness.
Answered by Nadhim Zahawi
Local authorities must fund childcare providers to deliver all the early years entitlements. Central government funds local authorities for the cost of delivering the entitlement for two-year-olds and the entitlements for three- and four-year-olds through the Dedicated Support Grant (DSG), based on take-up according to an annual census. It is the responsibility of local authorities to spend that funding according to the DSG conditions of grant.
We agree that the home learning environment is hugely important and that is why the Secretary of State for Education has set an ambition to halve by 2028 the number of children that finish their reception year still without the early communication and reading skills they need to thrive. This will mean supporting parents to help their child’s early language development, and contributions across society; with businesses, the media, the voluntary sector, and our tech industry forming a coalition to help take this work forward. This will commence with a summit this autumn.
Asked by: Lord Field of Birkenhead (Crossbench - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, with reference to the increase in the attainment gap between white boys eligible for free school meals and white boys not eligible for free school meals from 31 to 33 percentage points between 2015 and 2017; which schools have countered that trend; and what steps are being taken to disseminate their practice.
Answered by Nadhim Zahawi
A list of state-funded schools which had a decrease in the attainment gap between white males who were and were not eligible for free school meals (FSM) between 2014/15 and 2016/17 can be found in the attachment. The attainment measure used is achievement of A*-C/9-4 English and maths. The Education Endowment Foundation, funded by the Department of Education with £137 million to research and promote the most effective ways of improving the progress and attainment of disadvantaged pupils, is working in hundreds of English schools to show how all schools can make a difference to their disadvantaged pupils’ futures.
There were reforms to GCSE qualifications and associated attainment measures between 2015 and 2017 that mean the published figures for attainment of English and maths are not directly comparable. The analysis for this response accounts for this by applying the 2015 measure to the 2017 data. On this consistent basis, the attainment gap between FSM and non-FSM eligible pupils increased by 1 percentage point overall between 2015 and 2017. The attainment gap that these schools represent is not equal to the one calculated from published figures[1].
[1] Includes pupils eligible to be included in school level results, rather than national level results – this leads to small differences in the cohort compared to the published figures. Schools are included where they have at least six white male pupils who are eligible for FSM and six who are not; this is to protect the confidentiality of pupils in line with the department’s confidentiality policy (attached). Schools also must have a valid cohort in both years in order for the attainment gap change to be calculated – this mainly affects schools that closed or opened after 2014/15. Caution should be taken when looking at the change in attainment at school level due to the relatively small cohort sizes at some schools. The effect of a few low/high attaining pupils may greatly influence the overall change in attainment at a school with a small cohort; whilst some schools appear to have significant swings in the attainment gap, in many cases this will be a function of the changing cohort in the school over time.
Asked by: Lord Field of Birkenhead (Crossbench - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, how many and what proportion of children eligible for free school meals attained adequate levels of school readiness in (a) Birkenhead constituency, (b) Wirral, (c) the Liverpool City Region, and (d) England.
Answered by Nadhim Zahawi
The requested data is provided in Annex A, which is attached.
For completeness, figures have been provided for the two key Early Years Foundation Stage Profile indicators. These are the number of children achieving a Good Level of Development, which is the measure more widely used to assess school readiness, and the number of children achieving at least the expected level in all 17 Early Learning Goals.
Asked by: Lord Field of Birkenhead (Crossbench - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps his Department is taking to ensure that all deaf children get access to the specialist support they need at school.
Answered by Nadhim Zahawi
We want all children and young people, no matter what their special educational needs and disabilities (SEND), to be able to reach their full potential and receive the right support to succeed in their education and as they move into adult life. That is why, since 2014, we have supported the implementation of significant reforms, putting children, young people and their families at the heart of the system, and focusing on outcomes and transition to adult life.
To support the reforms, we provided £900,000 funding to the National Sensory Impairment Partnership between 2016 and 2018 to equip the school workforce to deliver high quality teaching for pupils with sensory impairments.
We have announced new contracts worth £23.8 million to help provide children who have SEND, including those who are deaf or have a hearing impairment, with access to excellent support.
New SEND regional leads are bringing together practitioners and networks in their local area to help identify and address SEND school improvement priorities and facilitate the exchange of knowledge and expertise.
Asked by: Lord Field of Birkenhead (Crossbench - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what information his Department holds on how many children are currently enrolled in a formal education setting.
Answered by Nick Gibb
The Department publishes information on the number of pupils and students enrolled in schools, further education and higher education in the annual ‘Education and training statistics for the UK: 2017’ statistical release: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/education-and-training-statistics-for-the-uk-2017.
Asked by: Lord Field of Birkenhead (Crossbench - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, whether he is taking steps to ensure that Childline has sufficient funding.
Answered by Nadhim Zahawi
The department is supporting the NSPCC through an £8 million grant over four years to 2020, as a contribution to funding Childline (a phone and online advice service for children) and the NSPCC’s National Helpline (for anyone with concerns or worries about a child).
Asked by: Lord Field of Birkenhead (Crossbench - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what guidance his Department provides to Regional Schools Commissioners on whether to consult with local hon. Members and multi-academy trusts with a relevant interest when brokering schools from a failing multi-academy trust.
Answered by Nadhim Zahawi
There is no formal guidance provided to Regional Schools Commissioners on the need to consult when re-brokering schools but we encourage transparency, listening exercises and communications with key stakeholders, which can include local MPs, to ensure that the department is in receipt of as much information as possible before deciding on a particular issue.