Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, how many performance reviews were undertaken for staff in (a) her Department and (b) its agencies in each of the last five years; in how many cases performance was rated as unsatisfactory or below; how many staff left as a result of such a rating; and what proportion of full-time equivalent staff this represented.

The department’s approach to performance management includes monthly check-in conversations held between employees and their line managers, which allow performance and progress to be discussed regularly. Under-performance is recorded through the monthly check-in process.

Information on the number of monthly conversations undertaken in the department in the last five financial years and the number where under-performance was recorded is set out in the following table. Note that, as conversations are held monthly, these figures do not represent the number of unique staff marked as under-performing in any year.

*Data is only available from September 2020, therefore, the 2020/21 financial year does not include April to August 2020.

The information has been provided in respect of the core department plus its three executive agencies Education and Skills Funding Agency, Standard and Testing Agency and Teaching Regulation Agency, combined.

The department does not hold a central dataset of the reasons for a dismissal in respect of those years.​ A development has been made to our HR system so that we can identify the number of dismissals due to unsatisfactory performance from July 2025 onwards.