Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, if she will make an assessment of the potential impact of the diversity of the content of the national curriculum on levels of engagement with education.

The department wants all children to be inspired, confident and motivated at school. The curriculum achieves this by fostering competence and mastery in each subject and inspires pupils by introducing them to the best that has been thought and said, opening access to their intellectual, cultural and scientific inheritance.

Providing every child with a broad, ambitious, knowledge-rich curriculum is essential to the task of spreading opportunity and levelling up. In turn, this ensures that pupils are equipped with the vital knowledge and skills they need to contribute to society and for their future careers. It is important that every school has a well-designed and well-sequenced curriculum which ensures children acquire knowledge in a broad range of subjects and prepares them, after the age of 16, to specialise and succeed in further and higher education or training.

The department knows that improving school attendance is vitally important to learning, wellbeing and safety, but that the barriers to attendance are complex and can often start beyond the school gate. The department remains committed to ensuring children are supported to attend school regularly, and school attendance is the Secretary of State’s top priority. That is why, this month, the department has expanded attendance hubs, supporting 1,000 additional schools, and invested £15 million to expand the attendance mentor programme. Securing good attendance cannot be seen in isolation, and effective practices for improvement involve close interaction with schools’ efforts on curriculum.