Asked by: Henry Smith (Conservative - Crawley)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what (a) steps his Department is taking and (b) incentives his Department is offering to help increase the proportion of male teachers in primary education.
Answered by Robin Walker
Schools should reflect society and the communities they serve, and it is important to attract and retain high-skilled, talented men into teaching.
The department does this through effective pay structures and by ensuring teaching remains a financially rewarding career. We remain committed to increasing teacher starting salaries to £30,000 to make teaching an attractive graduate option. While the pay restraint in academic year 2021/22 means we are now delivering this commitment to a revised timescale, the 5.5% uplift to starting pay in September 2020 has already made a substantial difference to the competitiveness of the early career pay offer.
The department’s ‘Teaching – Every Lesson Shapes A Life’ recruitment campaign is targeted at audiences of students, recent graduates and potential career changers regardless of gender, and we take every effort to ensure that our advertising is fully reflective of this across the full range of marketing materials we use.
In October, Apply for Teacher Training (Apply), our new application service for initial teacher training (ITT) in England, was rolled out nationally. Apply has been designed to be user-friendly and has been extensively tested with a diverse range of potential applicants, including men, to ensure it helps remove barriers to great teachers applying for ITT courses. Apply will also allow us to collect more data, giving us greater insight into candidate behaviour and the behaviour of providers of teacher training so that the department can identify barriers and work closely with ITT providers to explore, design and test new interventions to recruit more candidates from under-represented backgrounds into the sector.
Alongside a focus on recruitment, it is important we retain male teachers. This will be supported by our work to ensure that all new entrants to teacher training have the best possible start to the early stage of their career, regardless of gender.
World-class programmes developed by the Department for Education to support the school workforce, including our Early Career Framework (ECF) reforms for those at the beginning of careers and National Professional Qualifications (NPQs) to develop our best teaching and leadership talent, is the best training for everyone whatever their background. The ECF reforms provide a funded entitlement for all early career teachers in England to access high quality professional development at the start of their careers. NPQs are now freely available to all teachers in state-funded schools, as well as state-funded 16-19 organisations.
Asked by: Henry Smith (Conservative - Crawley)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what proportion of the £1.8 billion in education recovery funding, announced at the Spending Review on 27 October 2021, will be used to fund catch-up health and care services for (a) disabled and (b) other young people.
Answered by Will Quince
Health services are accessed through the NHS and not funded by the Department for Education. Local authorities are responsible for providing respite care and short breaks for disabled children, these services are funded through the main local government settlement.
Helping children and young people to catch up on education missed due to the COVID-19 outbreak remains a top priority of this government. Our £1.8 billion investment announced as part of the Spending Review is targeted at those who most need help catching up. It includes over £800 million to provide a universal uplift with an additional 40 hours of education for students aged 16-19 who have the least time left to recover; and an additional £1 billion of catch up funding directly to schools so they can best decide how to support education recovery for the pupils that need it, focused on evidence-based approaches.
The department has consistently prioritised children with SEND in our recovery programmes, for example by providing additional uplifts for those who attend specialist education providers (including SEND units in mainstream schools) in both the catch-up premium in the 2020/21 academic year and the recovery premium for the 2021/22 academic year, and providing additional funding to special and alternative provision schools to provide one to one tutoring for their pupils, with greater flexibility to schools to make it easier for them to take on local tutors or use existing staff to supplement those employed through the existing National Tutoring Programme. The 16-19 tuition fund continues to support students with SEND as at present through small group tuition.
The department is providing over £42 million in the 2021-22 financial year to continue funding projects to support children with SEND. This investment will ensure that specialist organisations around the country can continue to help strengthen local area performance, support families and provide practical support to schools and colleges. It will strengthen participation of parents and young people in the SEND system, ensuring they have a voice in designing policies and services and have access to high quality information and support.
Alongside recovery funding, the department is investing £2.6 billion between the financial years 2022 and 2025 to deliver new places and improve existing provision for pupils with SEND or who require alternative provision. This funding represents a significant, transformational investment in new high needs provision and will help deliver tens of thousands of new places.
More widely, the department has continued to provide local authorities with their full high needs revenue funding allocations throughout the COVID-19 outbreak, including more than £1.5 billion of high needs funding over financial years 2020-21 and 2021-22, bringing the total high needs funding allocated this year to more than £8 billion. The department announced in summer 2021 that high needs funding will increase by a further £780 million, or 9.6%, in the next financial year, compared to this year. Through the Spending Review the department secured for schools and children and young people with high needs an increase of £4.7 billion by financial year 2024-25, compared to our original 2022-23 plans. This includes £1.6 billion in additional funding for 2022-23 budgets, on top of the year-on-year increase of £2.4 billion already confirmed at the 2019 Spending Review, and which is intended to help the sector respond to the pressures the department knows they are seeing: in overall costs, in national insurance, on high needs, in managing COVID-19 and in supporting children and young people to recover from the COVID-19 outbreak. The department will confirm in due course how this funding will be allocated in 2022-23 for schools and high needs.
Asked by: Henry Smith (Conservative - Crawley)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, pursuant to the Answer of 4 June 2021 to Question 10325 on Education: Gender, what additional steps his Department is planning to take to help improve the average outcomes for boys to match those of girls given that the gender learning gap remains high at KS2 and KS4 levels.
Answered by Robin Walker
The department does not design education policy that exclusively targets certain groups of pupils with characteristics that are protected by the Equality Act 2010, including policy based on gender. We are committed to providing high quality education and training for everyone, whatever their background or personal characteristics.
Since 2010, the government has pursued a reform agenda to drive up academic standards for all and level up for the most disadvantaged pupils. When it comes to raising standards, evidence shows that teachers are the most important in-school factor affecting pupils’ education. In June 2021, the department announced an investment of over £250 million in the National Professional Qualifications and Early Career Framework programmes which are based on the best available evidence and have been developed in partnership with the Education Endowment Foundation. In addition, in October the department announced a Levelling Up Premium worth up to £3,000 tax-free for maths, physics, chemistry and computing teachers in years 1 to 5 of their careers. This will support recruitment and retention of specialist teachers in these subjects and in the schools and areas that need them most. Through this, the department is committed to helping tackle the education gap for all pupils.
Asked by: Henry Smith (Conservative - Crawley)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what plans he has to support local authorities to meet their statutory targets for Education, Health and Care plan assessment waiting times.
Answered by Vicky Ford
The special educational needs and disability (SEND) code of practice makes clear that local authorities must give their decision in response to any request for an education, health and care needs assessment within a maximum of 6 weeks from when the request was received or the point at which a child or young person was brought to the local authority’s attention.
We have been using data to provide challenge and support to those local authorities where there are long-standing delays. Additionally, because of circumstances relating to the COVID-19 outbreak, we are carrying out monthly surveys of local authority performance. Our teams of SEND Advisers, and colleagues in NHS England, are working with local authorities to help improve performance. Each year, we also deliver a training programme to local authorities, health, and social care staff on their statutory duties for education, health and care plans and reviews, and we have continued to do this on a virtual basis.
Ofsted and the Care Quality Commission (CQC) re-started their revisit programme to areas that received a Written Statement of Action in May, with the full inspection programme re-starting in June. We are continuing to provide support and challenge to individual local authorities with a Written Statement of Action. We have commissioned the CQC and Ofsted, with the support of the Department of Health and Social Care, to develop a new area SEND inspection framework to launch after the existing cycle has finished.
Furthermore, we are providing over £42 million in the 2021/22 financial year to continue funding projects to support children with SEND. This investment will ensure that specialist organisations around the country can continue to help strengthen local area performance, support families, and provide practical support to schools and colleges.
Asked by: Henry Smith (Conservative - Crawley)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, pursuant to Answer of 21 June 2021 to Question 10325 on Education: Gender and with reference to the attainment gap between girl and boys, if he will design education policy to target pupils who are falling behind in their attainment to help close the attainment gap between boys and girls in education.
Answered by Nick Gibb
The Department recognises, and continues to monitor, the educational attainment gap between girls and boys. We do not design education policy that exclusively targets certain groups of pupils based on gender. The Department is focused on providing world class education and training for everyone, whatever their background.
The Government recognises that extended school and college restrictions have had a substantial impact on children and young people’s education and is committed to helping pupils catch up. The Department has announced over £3 billion to support education recovery and pupil premium is providing over £2.5 billion in the 2021/22 financial year targeted at disadvantaged pupils.