Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment she has made of the development gap at pre-school between children and their peers measured by the early years foundation stage (a) nationally, (b) regionally and (c) by local authority in the latest period for which data is available.

On 20 October, the department published the early years foundation stage profile (EYFSP) results for the 2015 to 2016 academic year, at national and local authority level. At a national level, 69.3% of children achieved a good level of development (GLD), which is an increase of 3 percentage points on 2015. The same trend was seen in the percentage achieving at least the expected level across all early learning goals, which has increased by 3.2 percentage points from 2015. The EYFSP results are available at: www.gov.uk/government/statistics/early-years-foundation-stage-profile-results-2015-to-2016.

Information about the proportion of the lowest 20 per cent of children by attainment in each (a) region and (b) local authority is not readily available. However, we know that 18.6% of young children achieved a score of 29 or lower in the EYFSP 2016 results, and 21.5% of young children achieved a score of 30 or less. Therefore, we have provided this information (broken down by region and local authority) in an attachment to this response.

In relation to which local authorities did not improve their EYFSP results in 2016 compared to 2015, this information is available by using the ‘Year’ filter within Table 1 of the Main Tables via the link provided above.

The government publishes the EYFSP results at national and local authority level, and provides a commentary on the data at a national level via the Statistical First Release (SFR), which is available at: www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/561224/SFR50_2016_Text.pdf. The government is taking further steps to understand the regional attainment gap. In May 2016, the department commissioned a feasibility study to investigate the regional gap in early years at age 5, including recommendations to undertake a further study through longitudinal analysis of the Millennium Cohort Study to assess variation in attainment and evaluate the potential drivers of a regional gap.