Question

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what discussions she has had with the Secretary of State for Education on how her Department will measure how the Enrichment Expansion Programme delivers against the Enrichment Framework and the government’s ambition to halve the enrichment gap.

The Enrichment Expansion Programme (EEP), a DCMS-funded programme delivered in strategic partnership with DfE, will invest £22.5 million across 3 years to support up to 400 secondary schools to provide a youth led, tailored enrichment offer and help them meet the Enrichment Framework benchmarks. The Enrichment Framework is non-statutory guidance and will support education settings to plan a high-quality enrichment offer more strategically and intentionally with the aim of increasing the quality of and access to enrichment opportunities.

DCMS has commissioned an independent evaluator to conduct a process, impact and value for money evaluation of the EEP. The evaluation will consider how successfully the programme has delivered against its strategic objectives, which includes evaluating how successfully the programme has supported participating schools to meet the Framework benchmarks. This will include taking a baseline assessment of each school’s provision and pupil participation at the start of the programme to compare progress against by the end of the programme.