Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps her Department is taking to raise literacy standards amongst children from disadvantaged backgrounds.

The government’s aim is to raise the attainment of disadvantaged pupils to improve social mobility and break the cycle of disadvantage.

Research shows that using phonics is the most effective way of teaching children of all abilities to read. The evidence indicates that the teaching of phonics is most effective when combined with a language-rich curriculum to develop children’s positive attitudes towards literacy. This government has therefore placed phonics at the heart of the early teaching of reading. Three years after the introduction of the phonics screening check, 100,000 more six-year-olds are on track to become confident readers.

We have reformed the English curriculum and qualifications, raising expectations so that they match the best worldwide. The national curriculum introduced last year matches those in the highest-performing education jurisdictions in the world, challenging pupils to realise their potential regardless of their background.

We allocated £125 million in 2011 to establish the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), to identify what works to raise standards in underperforming schools. The EEF distributes funding to test approaches to improving performance in our most challenging schools. In 2012, we provided the EEF with an additional £10 million to test what works in helping pupils with poor reading skills to catch up.

We have introduced the Early Language Development Programme and made sure that all three- and four-year-olds, as well as two-year-olds from the lowest income families, have access to 15 hours of government-funded early education per week.

The pupil premium, introduced in 2011 and now worth £2.5 billion this year, gives schools the extra resources they need to close the gap between pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds and their peers.

For pupils that do not reach the expected level by the end of primary school, we have introduced the Year 7 Catch-up Premium. This gives secondary schools additional funding so that they can give extra support to those pupils that need it (£48.5 million in 2014-15).