Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, pursuant to the Answer of 23 May 2022 to Question 3510 on Secondary Education: Tameside, whether he will take steps to improve secondary school attainment by children in (a) Tameside and (b) Denton.

The department was pleased to announce the borough of Tameside, including Denton, as a Priority Education Investment Area (EIA) as part of the recent Schools White Paper.

The Schools White Paper sets out our vision for a school system that helps every child to fulfil their potential founded on achieving word-class standards of literacy and numeracy and confirmed our headline ambitions, including at key stage 4, to increase the GCSE average grade in English language and maths from 4.5 to 5.

In Priority EIAs, the department will offer intensive investment in addition to the significant support available to all EIAs, so that we can drive improvement further and faster. This has the potential to transform pupils’ outcomes at both primary and secondary school, by overcoming entrenched barriers to improvement and strengthening the school’s system in these areas.

In all 55 EIAs, the department will be taking steps to support underperforming schools to make the necessary improvements, build trust capacity, support improved digital connectivity in the schools that need this most and offer the Levelling Up premium, worth up to £3,000 tax free, to eligible teachers. Our additional support to Priority EIAs includes a share of around £40 million worth of funding to address local needs, such as those acting as a barrier to improvement at primary and priority access to a number of the department’s other programmes.

My noble Friend, the Minister for School System, has written to all Members of Parliament with Priority EIAs in their constituencies to update them on our next steps for the programme.