Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what criteria were used to select the first six social mobility opportunity areas; and if she will publish the evidence that that decision was based on.

The first six Opportunity Areas were selected from two different published data sets: the Social Mobility Commission’s Social Mobility Index and the data used to rank local authority districts on school performance and capacity in the March White Paper.

The Social Mobility Commission’s Index ranks 324 local authority districts based on a range of measures grouped under four headings: early years, school, youth and adulthood. We cross-referenced the lowest performing districts according to that index with our school performance and capacity data. This provided a shortlist from which we chose the first six areas.

We want to learn from what works in these areas, capturing which challenges all areas share and what is unique to a particular place. Therefore, the selection of these initial six areas was not based on ranking but a range of factors including regional spread and the type of area.

Social Mobility Index:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/social-mobility-index

Analysis

Education white paper, Educational excellence everywhere:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/educational-excellence-everywhere

Achieving Excellence Area Composite Indicator:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/defining-achieving-excellence-areas-methodology