Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, which recommendations the Government adopted from the Social Mobility Commission's State of the Nation Report (a) 2015, (b) 2016 and (c) 2017.

We welcome the Social Mobility Commission’s State of the Nation annual reports. They are wide-ranging, valuable pieces of work that support this government’s commitment to social mobility.

The Commission’s analysis has been an important input to the department’s work on social mobility.

We are investing £72 million in 12 Opportunity Areas in order to focus effort on areas of the country with the greatest challenges and fewest opportunities. All 12 of these were social mobility coldspots identified by the Commission in its Social Mobility Index published in 2016.

Social mobility is the department’s priority and we are making good progress across a range of areas. We will be spending around £6 billion per year on childcare and early education support by 2019-20. The attainment gap between disadvantaged pupils and their peers has narrowed since we introduced the Pupil Premium – now worth around £2.5 billion per year - in 2011. Young pupils from disadvantaged areas are now also entering universities at record rates.