Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps her Department is taking to close attainment gaps between the best and worst performing local authority areas as judged by GCSE and A Level results.

Our recent White Paper, ‘Educational Excellence Everywhere’, set out our intention to place a new focus on ‘Achieving Excellence Areas’ where too few children have access to a good school and there are insufficient high quality teachers, leaders, system leaders and sponsors. By doing this we will enable the school-led system to deliver rapid and sustainable improvement.

We want to eradicate the pockets of underperformance in our school system and will do so by targeting the Department for Education’s programmes in the areas of greatest need. We intend to pilot this approach from September 2016.