Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps his Department is taking to address regional inequalities in the UK for A-Level attainment.

The Department is committed to levelling up school standards and opportunities for all children, including those studying A levels. The Department does this through a mixture of policies that support disadvantaged pupils wherever they live in the country, as well as through extra support for places that fall behind.

Through the 16-19 funding formula, we provide additional funding to support disadvantaged students from economically deprived areas as well as students who have low prior attainment in maths and English. In the 2020/21 academic year, we allocated over £500 million of disadvantage funding (almost 10% of core programme funding).

For the 2020/21 academic year, we have also made up to £96 million available specifically for colleges, sixth forms and other 16-19 providers, to provide small group tutoring activity for disadvantaged 16-19 students whose studies have been disrupted through the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak.

The evidence is clear that early intervention is the best way to address educational inequalities that appear at A level and beyond. The Department is spending £2.4 billion this year through the pupil premium to tackle educational inequality in the school system, as well as investing in a number of reforms to improve the quality of teaching. The Early Career Framework reforms and support for newly qualified teachers is the biggest teaching reform in a generation. In autumn 2020, the Department launched the early roll-out of the Early Career Framework reforms for eligible schools in the North East, Greater Manchester, Bradford and Doncaster. Meanwhile, the Department’s Opportunity Areas and One North East programmes are helping to raise standards in areas of the country that face particular challenges.