Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps her Department is taking to tackle the attainment gap between pupils from different socioeconomic backgrounds.

Closing the attainment gap between disadvantaged and non disadvantaged pupils is a priority for the Department.

The Department has made progress in narrowing the gap over the ten years prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, narrowing the gap between disadvantaged children and other children by 13% at Key Stage 2 and 9% at Key Stage 4 between 2011 and 2019.

The Schools White Paper, published in March 2022, set out a long term vision for a school system that helps every child to fulfil their potential by ensuring that they receive the right support, in the right place, at the right time, founded on achieving world class literacy and numeracy.

The Department provides Pupil Premium funding to schools to raise the attainment of disadvantaged children. In the 2023/24 financial year, spending on Pupil Premium increased to almost £2.9 billion. The Department also launched the National Tutoring Programme (NTP) in November 2020, a scheme providing support for pupils most affected by disruption to their education because of the pandemic. In 2022/23, the Department provided £349 million of NTP funding directly to schools to enable them to decide how best to provide tutoring for their pupils, either through academic mentors, outsourced tuition partners or school led tutoring.

The Department has identified 55 Education Investment Areas (EIAs), where educational outcomes were the weakest. These EIAs will commit up to £86 million in trust capacity funding until March 2025, the Levelling Up Premium offering higher payments worth up to £3,000 tax-free per year to maths, physics, chemistry and computing teachers working in EIAs, and up to £150 million for extending the Connect the Classroom programme to upgrade schools that fall below the Department’s Wi-Fi connectivity standards.

The Department will also be making additional funding in 24 Priority EIAs (PEIAs), selected due to their low performance and economic deprivation. In these PEIAs, the Department has established local partnership boards to identify actions to improve literacy and numeracy and provided up to £42 million in additional funding for bespoke interventions to improve attainment at Key Stages 2 and 4, alongside other interventions.