Asked by: Imran Ahmad Khan (Independent - Wakefield)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps his Department has taken to encourage the uptake of apprenticeships among teenagers and young people in (a) Wakefield and (b) West Yorkshire.
Answered by Gillian Keegan - Secretary of State for Education
Apprenticeships provide young people with the opportunity to earn and learn the skills needed to start an exciting career in a wide range of industries, everything from artificial intelligence, archaeology, data science, business management, and banking. We want more young people across the country to benefit from high-quality apprenticeships. Since May 2010, there have been 36,640 apprenticeship starts in Wakefield (local authority).
To encourage more young people to consider apprenticeships, we are promoting apprenticeships in schools across the country through our Apprenticeship Support & Knowledge programme. This free service provides schools and teachers with resources and interventions to help better educate young people about apprenticeships. In the Skills for Jobs White Paper, published in January, we announced the introduction of a 3-point-plan to enforce the Baker Clause, our requirement that all maintained schools and academies provide opportunities for providers of technical education and apprenticeships to visit schools to talk to all year 8 to 13 pupils. This includes creating clear minimum legal requirements, specifying who is to be given access to which pupils and when. This is an important step towards real choice for every pupil.
We are also working with the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) to enable Kickstart placements to turn into apprenticeships where that is the right thing for the employer and the young person. We have made a special provision to allow employers taking on Kickstarters as apprentices to be eligible for the incentive payment, which will increase to £3000 from 1 April 2021 until September 2021, supporting a pathway between the schemes.
In addition, we are supporting the largest ever expansion of traineeships to ensure that more young people have access to high-quality training to develop the skills, experience, and confidence to obtain an apprenticeship. My right hon. Friend, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, confirmed an additional £126 million at the Budget to fund a further 40,000 traineeship places in the 2021/22 academic year, and we have extended the £1000 incentive payments for employers who offer traineeship work placement opportunities to July 2022. We are taking several steps to raise awareness of traineeships among young people. We have created a new online collection of free resources for schools including factsheets, case studies and a guide for teachers. We are also working with the National Careers Service and DWP to ensure that young people across the country understand the different options available to them and are supported on the right path.
Asked by: Imran Ahmad Khan (Independent - Wakefield)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps his Department has taken to increase numeracy levels in children from low-income households.
Answered by Nick Gibb
The Education Endowment Foundation highlights that “quality of teaching is the single most important driver of pupil attainment and a range of other positive outcomes”. The Department’s national network of 40 school-led Maths Hubs aims to help local schools improve the quality of their mathematics teaching based on best practice. The Maths Hubs programme aims to help improve attainment gaps, which may be associated with disadvantage or other factors.
Maths Hubs deliver our £100 million Teaching for Mastery programme, which is bringing mastery teaching methods to 11,000 primary and secondary schools across England by 2023, including throughout the COVID-19 outbreak. Mastery teaching focusses on depth of understanding and is based on best practice from East-Asian jurisdictions that perform highly in international mathematics tests. Mastery is characterised by whole-class teaching, where pupils work on the same content together, ensuring no one gets left behind. It encourages all pupils with the belief that by working hard at mathematics they can succeed and rejects the idea that some pupils “can’t do maths”. The programme also includes funding for approved maths textbooks, which is currently focussed on schools with the highest proportions of disadvantaged pupils.
Recent international testing results demonstrate our progress on mathematics. In PISA 2018 there was a significant improvement in maths scores for 15-year-olds, particularly for lower attaining pupils. Similarly, results from TIMSS 2019 show our Year 5 and Year 9 pupils continue to perform above the international average – with a significant improvement in attainment for our Year 5 pupils.
Asked by: Imran Ahmad Khan (Independent - Wakefield)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps his Department is taking to increase the number of teachers recruited from (a) Wakefield and (b) West Yorkshire.
Answered by Nick Gibb
It is a top priority of the Government to ensure that we continue to attract, retain and develop the high-quality teachers we need to inspire the next generation. We are moving forward with delivery of the Teacher Recruitment and Retention Strategy that the Government published in January 2019.
The Early Career Framework (ECF), the biggest teaching reform in a generation, will provide newly-qualified teachers with a funded, two-year support package. Targeted early roll-out of the ECF is currently taking place for 1,900 newly qualified teachers in Bradford, the North East, Greater Manchester and Doncaster. Around 4,600 more newly qualified teachers were targeted and are benefiting from a one-year support package based on the ECF, including in disadvantaged areas.
We recognise that some schools and local areas face greater challenges with recruitment and retention than others. To supplement the national strategy, we are delivering targeted programmes to support recruitment and retention in these areas, including funding a range of regionally targeted initiatives. Wakefield, as well as Bradford, Calderdale, Leeds and Kirklees, are areas where eligible mathematics and physics teachers can claim a £2,000 retention payment in the 2019-20 and 2020-21 academic years. Eligible mathematics, physics, chemistry and languages teachers in Bradford and Kirklees can apply for larger early-career payments of up to £7,500. Finally, Bradford is one of 25 local authorities where eligible languages, physics, chemistry, biology and computing teachers can claim back student loan repayments.
Asked by: Imran Ahmad Khan (Independent - Wakefield)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps his Department is taking to encourage university applications amongst students from the backgrounds least likely to currently go to university.
Answered by Michelle Donelan - Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology
It is more crucial than ever before that we tap into the brilliant talent that our country has to offer, and make sure that university places are available to all who are qualified by ability and attainment to pursue them and who wish to do so.
All higher education (HE) providers wanting to charge higher level fees must have an Access and Participation Plan agreed by the Office for Students (OfS), in which they set out the measures that they intend to take to support students from disadvantaged backgrounds and under-represented groups to access HE and succeed in it.
In our latest strategic guidance to the OfS, we asked them to urge providers to do more to ensure that all students, particularly those from the most disadvantaged backgrounds, are recruited to HE courses that will deliver good outcomes. Too many students are being let down by HE courses with low completion rates and courses which have no real labour market demand and therefore do not lead them into skilled employment. We also asked the OfS to encourage providers to do much more to work with schools in a way which meaningfully raises the attainment of disadvantaged children.
We want to help disadvantaged students by driving up standards and providing equality of opportunity so that students have access to new skills and better paid jobs. This is fundamental to this government’s ambition of enabling every person to fulfil their potential.
Asked by: Imran Ahmad Khan (Independent - Wakefield)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps his Department has taken to ensure that students continue to benefit from the Holocaust Educational Trust’s, Lessons from Auschwitz programme during the covid-19 outbreak.
Answered by Nick Gibb
The Department has remained fully committed to Holocaust education during the COVID-19 outbreak. The Holocaust is the only subject named as a compulsory part of the history curriculum which ensures that young people from every background can continue to learn about the Holocaust and its relevance today.
The Holocaust Educational Trust (HET) has adapted delivery of the Lessons from Auschwitz programme during the COVID-19 outbreak. Although in-person visits to Auschwitz have been suspended, HET has continued to support students and teachers in learning about the Holocaust by delivering resources, continuing professional development and events online.
Asked by: Imran Ahmad Khan (Independent - Wakefield)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what support his Department has put in place to support performing arts colleges during the covid-19 outbreak.
Answered by Gillian Keegan - Secretary of State for Education
Performing Arts Colleges registered under the department’s Dance and Drama Awards programme, are private organisations.
Programme funding offers income-assessed support for students’ tuition fees and living costs. The intention being to provide a contribution to the costs of participating for talented individuals who want to become professional actors and dancers.
The organisations themselves could also benefit from the extensive and unprecedented package of support measures for businesses across the country announced by my right hon. Friend, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, such as loans, tax relief and cash grants.