Asked by: Henry Smith (Conservative - Crawley)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps his Department is taking to help ensure that young carers and their families are (a) identified and (b) adequately supported so that those young people can be helped to achieve at school.
Answered by Vicky Ford
The government is committed to supporting young carers so that they are properly protected from excessive or inappropriate caring responsibilities and are supported to achieve their full potential. Consistent identification remains challenging, with many being ‘hidden’ and therefore unrecognised and/or unsupported.
Changes through the Children and Families Act 2014 simplified the legislation relating to young adult carers’ assessments, making rights and duties clearer to both young people and practitioners. This included promoting whole family approaches which triggers both and adult support services into action – assessing why a child is caring, what needs to change and what would help the family to prevent children or young people from taking on this responsibility in the first place.
The Department for Education also provides schools with £2.4 billion each year in additional funding through the pupil premium to support disadvantaged pupils. We expect schools to make effective use of their pupil premium budgets. Schools know their pupils best and will spend the grant accordingly to meet pupil needs, which includes where needs are based on a parent’s health issues or disability.
We published the Children in Need Review conclusion in 2019. This sets out our approach to helping schools and children’s social care improve the educational outcomes of children in need, including those young carers assessed as being in need of help and protection.
Asked by: Henry Smith (Conservative - Crawley)
Question to the Department for Education:
What assessment he has made of the adequacy of the level of funding allocated to schools in Crawley constituency.
Answered by Nick Gibb
For 2019-20 schools in Crawley attracted 5.6% more funding per pupil compared to 2017-18. This is an additional £235 per pupil. The additional funding announced last week means further increases for every school in Crawley over the next three years. School-level details will be announced in due course.
Asked by: Henry Smith (Conservative - Crawley)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment he made of the implications for his Department's policies of the recent National Literacy Trust findings on the literacy benefits of children reading both digital and print formats.
Answered by Nick Gibb
The Department welcomes the National Literacy Trust’s research on reading in both print and digital forms.
The Department encourages children to develop the habit of reading widely and often, for both pleasure and information, whatever the format. Research suggests that reading for pleasure is more important for children’s educational development than their parents’ level of education.
There is sound evidence that systematic synthetic phonics is a highly effective method of teaching reading to children. Phonics performance is improving: in 2018, there were 163,000 more 6 year olds on track to become fluent readers compared to 2012. This represented 82% of pupils meeting the expected standard in the phonics screening check, compared to just 58% when the check was introduced in 2012.
Building on the success of our phonics partnerships and phonics roadshows programmes, in 2018 we launched a £26.3 million English Hubs Programme. Hub schools are taking a leading role in improving the teaching of early reading through systematic synthetic phonics, early language development, and reading for pleasure. We have appointed 34 primary schools across England as English Hubs.
Asked by: Henry Smith (Conservative - Crawley)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what recent comparative assessment he has made of the level of funding for education in (a) England and (b) EU member states.
Answered by Nick Gibb
The Department uses internationally comparable data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to assess how our funding compares internationally.
This data shows that the UK is among the higher spenders on education at primary and secondary level. The UK government spends 3.8% of GDP on primary and secondary educational institutions, compared to an EU22 average of 3.0%. Within the EU, only Belgium (4.1%) and Finland (4.0%) spend a higher proportion of GDP on primary and secondary educational institutions than the UK. The OECD data also shows that the UK is the top spender in the G7 on schools and colleges delivering primary and secondary education, as a percentage of GDP.
Total expenditure on primary and secondary educational institutions as a percentage of GDP, from government sources (2015) in EU countries in the OECD analysis can be found in the table below:
Country | Expenditure as a percentage of GDP |
Austria | 3.0 |
Belgium | 4.1 |
Czech Republic | 2.4 |
Denmark | Missing |
Estonia | 2.7 |
Finland | 4.0 |
France | 3.4 |
Germany | 2.6 |
Greece | 2.7 |
Hungary | 2.7 |
Ireland | 2.5 |
Italy | 2.8 |
Latvia | 3.3 |
Luxembourg | 2.8 |
Netherlands | 3.2 |
Poland | 2.9 |
Portugal | 3.4 |
Slovak Republic | 2.6 |
Slovenia | 3.0 |
Spain | 2.7 |
Sweden | 3.6 |
United Kingdom | 3.8 |
EU22 average | 3.0 |
The data on expenditure on educational institutions as a percentage of GDP by source of funds is available in Table C2.2 of the OECD’s Education at a Glance 2018 publication at the following link: https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/education-at-a-glance-2018/total-expenditure-on-educational-institutions-as-a-percentage-of-gdp-by-source-of-funds-2015_eag-2018-table140-en.