Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment his Department has made of the impact of poverty on the objectives set in the Opportunity for All white paper.

The schools white paper sets out two ambitions for 2030:

• 90% of primary school children will achieve the expected standard in reading, writing and mathematics, and the percentage of children meeting the expected standard in the worst performing areas will have increased by a third.
• In secondary schools, the national GCSE average grade in both English language and in mathematics will increase from 4.5 in 2019 to 5 by 2030.

The needs and challenges faced by the most disadvantaged pupils have been considered in the development of the ambitions and policies in the white paper. For instance, pupil premium funding is used to drive the attainment of pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds. Pupil premium funding will increase to over £2.6 billion in the 2022/23 financial year. Support and investment are also being provided to 55 Education Investment Areas in cold spots of the country where outcomes for children and young people are weakest. More intensive support is being provided to 24 of these areas to address entrenched underperformance in areas with some of the highest rates of disadvantage in the country.

Meeting the white paper ambitions will have even larger benefits to society. Quantifying wider welfare effects is complex, but we do know that basic skills can help insulate against particularly bad outcomes for personal wellbeing, such as unemployment and low job quality. The economic benefits of meeting the ambitions set out in the schools white paper was published on 28 March 2022, and can be found here: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1063572/Economic_benefits_of_SWP_ambitions_March_2022.pdf