Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, with reference to the Government's Spending Review 2021, Priority outcomes and metrics, what the baseline year is that her Department uses to determine whether it has achieved the goal of increasing the number of additional girls in education, year-on-year change, in priority countries; and how many girls were in education in that baseline year.

As part of the UK's G7 Presidency this year, G7 partners agreed to work with developing countries to get 40 million more girls into school by 2026. This is a global goal, and a milestone towards achieving Sustainable Development Goal 4 by 2030. The enrolment data used is for girls of primary and lower-secondary school age living in low and lower-middle income countries. The data is published by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics and 2020 is the baseline year, when 314 million such girls were estimated to be in school.