School Funding: National Insurance Contributions Grant and Pupil Premium
(3 days, 6 hours ago)
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The Secretary of State for Education (Bridget Phillipson)
Today the Department for Education has confirmed national insurance contributions grant funding rates and schools’ pupil premium funding rates for the financial year 2025-26.
The NICs grant will provide schools, colleges, and high-needs settings with over £1 billion to support them with the increases to employer national insurance contributions from April 2025, broken down as set out in the table below.
Setting/phase | NICs grant funding in 2025-26 |
|---|---|
Mainstream (5-16) schools and academies | £786 million |
High needs settings | £125 million |
Local authority centrally employed teachers | £22 million |
Post-16 providers | £155 million |
Early years providers | £25 million |
Despite the challenging economic context, core funding for schools was prioritised in the Budget, and the NICs support is additional to the £2.3 billion increase announced in October. This means that the core schools budget will total over £64.8 billion in 2025-26.
Further information can be found on: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-insurance-contributions-nics-grant-and-early-years-national-insurance-contributions-ey-nics-grant-for-2025-to-2026.
The pupil premium grant provides additional funding to schools to support disadvantaged pupils so that they achieve and thrive in education. Total pupil premium funding will rise to over £3 billion in 2025-26, an increase of almost 5% from 2024-25.
The pupil premium funding rates are increasing by 2.39%—and then rounded—compared to 2024-25 rates, in line with the forecast GDP deflator measure of inflation. The table below sets out the new pupil premium rates that will take effect from 1 April 2025.
2025-26 pupil premium rate | |
|---|---|
Primary pupils who are eligible for free school meals, or have been eligible in the past six years | £1,515 |
Secondary pupils who are eligible for free school meals, or have been eligible in the past six years | £1,075 |
Children who are looked after by the local authority | £2,630 |
Pupils previously looked after by a local authority or other state care | £2,630 |
The grant also provides support for children and young people of service families, referred to as service pupil premium. The service pupil premium rate is also increasing by 2.39%—and then rounded—in 2025-26, to £350 per eligible pupil from 1 April 2025.
Further information can be found at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/pupil-premium/pupil-premium
[HCWS532]
World Health Organisation Pandemic Accord Negotiations
(3 days, 6 hours ago)
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The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Ashley Dalton)
I would like to update the House regarding the latest round of negotiations on a legally binding international agreement on pandemic prevention, preparedness and response—the pandemic accord—at the World Health Organisation (WHO).
In March 2021, the UK joined other WHO member states in calling for a pandemic accord that would ensure the world is better prepared for any future pandemic. Negotiations on the pandemic accord have been ongoing since 2022, and member states have until the World Health Assembly in May 2025 to reach an agreement.
The pandemic accord aims to enable a better co-ordinated, global response to pandemic threats and facilitate more equitable and timely access to pandemic-related vaccines, treatments, and tests. With a future pandemic a certainty, the pandemic accord is an opportunity to better protect the UK against this threat and to deliver on the Government’s health and growth missions, including through improving pandemic prevention, promoting innovation in pandemic related research and development (R&D), and putting in place systems that can promptly respond to pandemic threats when they emerge. The UK will only sign up to a pandemic accord which is both in the national interest and protects the health of people in the UK and around the world.
Member states have reached provisional agreement on around 75% of the text, while negotiating on the principle that “nothing is agreed until everything is agreed”. Since the House was last updated in November, provisional agreement has been reached on articles covering sustainable financing for the implementation of the agreement, and R&D. During the latest round of negotiations, between 17 and 21 February, some progress was made on portions of the text covering pandemic prevention, the opening chapter of the accord (covering definitions, objectives, and principles), and pathogen access and benefit sharing (PABS). However, there is still some way to go on several issues, including on technology transfer and further areas within the pandemic prevention and PABS articles, with limited time remaining to negotiate the text. The UK Government remain committed to working with member states to reach an effective agreement.
I will continue to update the House as negotiations near conclusion.
[HCWS529]
Prison Capacity: Operation Safeguard
(3 days, 6 hours ago)
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The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Shabana Mahmood)
This Government inherited a prison system on the verge of collapse, which would have left the courts unable to send offenders to prison and the police unable to arrest dangerous criminals. I took decisive action and implemented changes to the standard determinate sentence release point which provided essential but temporary relief to the system.
When I updated Parliament in July 2024, I was clear that the capacity crisis would not disappear immediately and the changes to release points were never the whole solution to the prison capacity crisis we inherited. To put our criminal justice system on a sustainable footing for the long term, I launched the independent review of sentencing in October and set out the 10-year prison capacity strategy to deliver the 14,000 new prison places we promised. In my commitment to transparency, I also laid the first annual statement on prison capacity, setting out expected demand and supply for prison places.
Over the last three months population growth in the prison estate has been high—January saw the highest average monthly prison population growth in almost two years, which has only just begun to slow. As of 17 March, there were 824 places remaining in the adult male estate. We are operating at more than 99% occupancy. Operating this close to critical capacity increases the risk that prisons do not have sufficient space for a given prisoner entering the system and so an alternative has to be found, which is most frequently in a police cell. In recent weeks this has happened hundreds of times, far above the rate seen during normal operations. On the night of 10 March, there were 124 no-space lockouts, which is the highest number of business-as-usual lockouts on record.
We have just opened a new 458-capacity houseblock at HMP Rye Hill. In addition, in a few weeks’ time, I will be opening HMP Millsike, a brand new 1,500 capacity prison in North Yorkshire.
However, I expect prison capacity will remain tight until the new capacity is fully operational. Given the recent increase in demand, it is necessary, and prudent, for me to temporarily reactivate Operation Safeguard to better manage the flow of offenders into the prison estate. This is an established protocol that will ensure that His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service and police forces can jointly plan which police cells may be required to hold offenders on any particular day. The previous Government last activated Operation Safeguard in February 2023; it ran until it was formally deactivated in October 2024 by this Government. This time we have a clear plan to improve capacity and minimise the use of Safeguard.
Safeguard will help ensure temporary pressures on the prison estate are managed effectively with partners in the police. We will keep its use under constant review and work closely with police colleagues to ensure we can stand down cells as soon as they are not required.
I am incredibly grateful for the support of police colleagues and want to pay tribute to the continued extraordinary work of our frontline staff in police, courts, prisons and probation whose daily efforts keep the public safe.
[HCWS531]
Draft Equality (Race and Disability) Bill: Public Consultation
(3 days, 6 hours ago)
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The Minister for Equalities (Seema Malhotra)
This Government are committed to ensuring that equality and opportunity are at the heart of our programme for national renewal. Our plan for change sets out the ambitious—but achievable—milestones we aim to reach by the end of this Parliament. The work we are doing will improve the lives of working people and strengthen our country.
The manifesto and King’s Speech last July announced our intention to legislate to deliver mandatory ethnicity and disability pay gap reporting for larger employers. These measures will help employers identify and tackle pay disparities across their workforces, remove barriers to opportunity for ethnic minority and disabled staff and support our plan for change in driving up household income for all.
Today we are launching a public consultation in support of this. Responses to the consultation will help shape the pay gap reporting measures that we will include in the draft Equality (Race and Disability) Bill, to be published later in this Session.
We are particularly interested to hear from those who will be impacted by these proposals, including employers, representative bodies, trade unions, race and disability stakeholders, ethnic minority and disabled people, and disabled people’s organisations.
We are considering what other measures the draft Bill could incorporate, including through a call for evidence which will be published separately. The call for evidence will include consideration of how we make the right to equal pay effective for ethnic minority and disabled people.
We are also announcing today that we are establishing a race equality engagement group to help us develop further measures to tackle race inequality. This group, which will be chaired by Baroness Lawrence of Clarendon, will enable us to work closely with communities and stakeholders to find out what matters most to them.
A copy of the consultation document will be placed in the Libraries of both Houses and will be available on gov.uk.
[HCWS530]