Asked by: Lord McNicol of West Kilbride (Labour - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask Her Majesty's Government what plans they have to establish a GCSE course in the Kurdish language; and what support the Department for Education provides for the teaching of this language.
Answered by Baroness Barran - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Education)
There are no current plans to add additional language GCSEs to the existing range of subjects. It is exam boards who are responsible for deciding, based on the existing modern foreign languages subject content, which language GCSEs are offered. The government would support an exam board in developing a language GCSE, including in Kurdish, if the board considered there was a strong case to do so, including sufficient demand.
It is up to schools to decide which languages are taught as part of their curriculum in both primary and secondary schools. There are several supplementary schools in England which teach Kurdish to children and young people outside of their regular schooling, where parents may choose to send their children for Kurdish tuition. Further information on supplementary schools can be found on the National Resource Centre for Supplementary Education’s website at: www.supplementaryeducation.org.uk.
Asked by: Lord McNicol of West Kilbride (Labour - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask Her Majesty's Government what plans they have, if any, to introduce a dedicated mental health first aider in every secondary school in England.
Answered by Baroness Barran - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Education)
The department does not hold data on the number of Mental Health First Aiders in schools and we believe it is important that schools are able to decide what training they offer to their staff based on the individual circumstances of the school.
However, we have made sure that schools have access to a range of training, so teachers understand and respond to the mental health and wellbeing issues that pupils face, including those issues that are as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak.
The response to the consultation on the ‘Transforming children and young people’s mental health provision: a green paper’, published in July 2018, confirmed our commitment to provide mental health awareness training for a member of staff from all state-funded secondary schools in England by March 2020. The Department of Health and Social Care awarded the final year (19-20) of this 3 year programme to deliver Mental Health Awareness Training to all eligible secondary schools to the Anna Freud Centre, having previously been delivered by Mental Health First Aid England.
For the longer term, we announced £9.5 million on 10 May 2021 to offer senior mental health lead training to around a third of all state schools and colleges in the 2021/22 academic year, as part of its commitment to offer this training to all state schools and colleges by 2025. A senior mental health lead is a strategic leadership role in a school or college, responsible for overseeing the settings whole school or college approach to promote children and young people’s mental health and wellbeing, as well as supporting those who need help with their mental health to receive appropriate support. The role is not mandatory, and the senior mental health lead training will not be compulsory.
Since applications opened in October 2021, over 8,000 eligible schools and colleges have applied for a senior mental health training grant. Over 6,500 of these have booked onto a Department for Education quality-assured training course and over 3,500 senior leads are estimated to have begun their training.
Ahead of this, to respond to the COVID-19 outbreak, our recent £15 million Wellbeing for Education Recovery and Return programmes provided free expert training, support and resources for school and college staff dealing with children and young people experiencing mental health issues. Information provided by 95% of local authorities, on how they delivered training and support using Wellbeing for Education Return funding, suggests that training and support reached over 12,000 education settings. Many local authorities have also told us that this funding has enabled and accelerated cross-system collaboration to support education settings, staff, children and young people and their families. Local areas continue to share examples of practice (promotional materials, worksheets, presentations, links to recorded sessions and local directories and evaluations) with us and each other.
Asked by: Lord McNicol of West Kilbride (Labour - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask Her Majesty's Government how many trained mental health first aiders there are in secondary schools in England.
Answered by Baroness Barran - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Education)
The department does not hold data on the number of Mental Health First Aiders in schools and we believe it is important that schools are able to decide what training they offer to their staff based on the individual circumstances of the school.
However, we have made sure that schools have access to a range of training, so teachers understand and respond to the mental health and wellbeing issues that pupils face, including those issues that are as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak.
The response to the consultation on the ‘Transforming children and young people’s mental health provision: a green paper’, published in July 2018, confirmed our commitment to provide mental health awareness training for a member of staff from all state-funded secondary schools in England by March 2020. The Department of Health and Social Care awarded the final year (19-20) of this 3 year programme to deliver Mental Health Awareness Training to all eligible secondary schools to the Anna Freud Centre, having previously been delivered by Mental Health First Aid England.
For the longer term, we announced £9.5 million on 10 May 2021 to offer senior mental health lead training to around a third of all state schools and colleges in the 2021/22 academic year, as part of its commitment to offer this training to all state schools and colleges by 2025. A senior mental health lead is a strategic leadership role in a school or college, responsible for overseeing the settings whole school or college approach to promote children and young people’s mental health and wellbeing, as well as supporting those who need help with their mental health to receive appropriate support. The role is not mandatory, and the senior mental health lead training will not be compulsory.
Since applications opened in October 2021, over 8,000 eligible schools and colleges have applied for a senior mental health training grant. Over 6,500 of these have booked onto a Department for Education quality-assured training course and over 3,500 senior leads are estimated to have begun their training.
Ahead of this, to respond to the COVID-19 outbreak, our recent £15 million Wellbeing for Education Recovery and Return programmes provided free expert training, support and resources for school and college staff dealing with children and young people experiencing mental health issues. Information provided by 95% of local authorities, on how they delivered training and support using Wellbeing for Education Return funding, suggests that training and support reached over 12,000 education settings. Many local authorities have also told us that this funding has enabled and accelerated cross-system collaboration to support education settings, staff, children and young people and their families. Local areas continue to share examples of practice (promotional materials, worksheets, presentations, links to recorded sessions and local directories and evaluations) with us and each other.
Asked by: Lord McNicol of West Kilbride (Labour - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask Her Majesty's Government what plans they have to provide additional resources to schools for addressing mental health issues experienced by young people during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Answered by Baroness Barran - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Education)
Mental health and wellbeing are a priority for the government. Throughout the COVID-19 outbreak, we have prioritised keeping schools open above all else because they are vital for children and young people’s wellbeing, as well as their education.
We are investing £3 billion to boost learning, including £950 million in additional funding for schools which they can use to support pupils’ mental health and wellbeing.
In May, as part of Mental Health Awareness Week, we announced more than £17 million of mental health funding to improve mental health and wellbeing support in schools and colleges. This includes £7 million additional funding for local authorities to deliver the Wellbeing for Education Recovery programme. This builds on our £8 million Wellbeing for Education Return programme in 2020/21, which provided free expert training, support and resources for staff dealing with children and young people experiencing additional pressures from the last year. Wellbeing for Education Return has been used by more than 90% of councils since its launch last summer.
Up to 7,800 schools and colleges in England will be offered funding worth £9.5 million to train a senior mental health lead from their staff in the next academic year, which is part of the government’s commitment to offering this training to all state schools and colleges by 2025.
Training will provide senior leads with the knowledge and skills to develop or introduce a whole school or college approach to mental health and wellbeing in their setting. It will encourage staff to develop their own understanding of issues affecting their pupils, giving young people a voice in how their school or college addresses wellbeing and working with parents and monitoring pupils where appropriate.
Additionally, our Mental Health in Education Action Group, has worked to identify and put in place further specific help to education settings to provide support for children and young people’s mental wellbeing at this critical time, and in the longer term.
This support for practice in schools is in addition to the £79 million boost to children and young people’s mental health support we announced in March, which will include increasing the number of Mental Health Support Teams. The support teams - which provide early intervention on mental health and emotional wellbeing issues in schools and colleges - will grow from the 59 set up by last March to around 400 by April 2023, supporting nearly 3 million children.
The department has recently brought together all its sources of advice or schools and colleges into a single site, which includes signposting to external sources of mental health and wellbeing support for teachers, school staff and school leaders: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/mental-health-and-wellbeing-support-in-schools-and-colleges#mental-health-and-wellbeing-resources. This also includes guidance to support relationships, sex and health education curriculum planning, covering of the key issues children and young people have been concerned about throughout the COVID-19 outbreak: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/teaching-about-mental-wellbeing.
Asked by: Lord McNicol of West Kilbride (Labour - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask Her Majesty's Government, further to the Social Mobility Commission's report The road not taken: the drivers of course selection, published on 30 March, what steps they intend to take to help disadvantaged young people with travel costs so they are not priced out of travelling to certain courses or apprenticeships which should otherwise be available to them.
Answered by Baroness Berridge
The statutory responsibility for transport to education and training for those aged 16 to 19 rests with local authorities. This enables them to make decisions that best match local needs and circumstances. Local authorities must publish a policy statement each year setting out the support available. They are expected to make reasonable decisions based on the needs of their population, the local transport infrastructure and the resources they have available. This does not, however, have to include free or subsidised transport.
The options available to young people to participate, and meet Raising the Participation Age legislation, mean that young people travel to diverse and widespread locations. It would not be financially feasible for local authorities to fund every young person’s post-16 transport, particularly where the young people are receiving pay through, for example, an apprenticeship. Parents and students have a right to appeal if they are unhappy with the arrangements the local authority have put in place.
We do recognise that the cost of transport can be an issue for some young people, and the 16 to 19 Bursary Fund is allocated directly to 16-19 providers to support young people who may need additional support with costs such as transport.
Beginning in the 2020/21 academic year, we have recently changed the way we allocate funding for discretionary bursaries to providers of 16-19 education, following a consultation. As a result, institutions whose students will tend to face higher travel costs, who travel further or live in rural areas, will receive more funding to provide support to students who need it. This ensures a better match between bursary allocations and the needs of students.
In August 2019, the 16 and 17-year-old railcard was made available nationally offering half price rail fares for those in further education and apprenticeships.
We also support local authorities and their duty by facilitating the regular sharing of good practice and conducting annual compliance checks on their policy statements.
Asked by: Lord McNicol of West Kilbride (Labour - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask Her Majesty's Government, further to the Social Mobility Commission's report The road not taken: the drivers of course selection, published on 30 March, what steps they intend to take to provide targeted support resources to address the challenges faced by disadvantaged pupils.
Answered by Baroness Berridge
Enabling every child, irrespective of their background, to realise their potential at school has been at the centre of this government’s education policy since 2010. We do not design education policy that exclusively targets specific groups of pupils, for example based on their ethnicity or gender. Our policies are aimed at improving the education of all disadvantaged children and young people, especially as we know that their education has been impacted most heavily by the COVID-19 outbreak.
In June 2020, as part of the £1 billion Covid catch up package, we announced £350 million to fund the National Tutoring Programme for disadvantaged students for the academic years 2020/21 and 2021/22. There is extensive evidence that tutoring is one of the most effective ways to accelerate pupil progress, and we want to extend this opportunity to disadvantaged and vulnerable pupils. The programme provides additional, targeted support for those children and young people who have been hardest hit from disruption to their education as a result of school closures. Teachers and school leaders should exercise professional judgement when identifying which pupils would benefit most from this additional support. This investment was announced in tandem with the £650 million Catch-Up Premium, additional funding for all schools to support education recovery in academic year 2020/21.
On 24 February 2021, we announced a £700 million Education Recovery package, building on the £1 billion from last year. As well as a range of measures to support all pupils to recover lost learning, the package includes significant funding aimed at addressing the needs of disadvantaged pupils. This includes a new one-off £302 million Recovery Premium, which includes £22 million to scale up proven approaches, for state funded schools in the 2021/22 academic year. This grant will further support pupils who need it most. Allocations will reflect disadvantage funding eligibility and will have additional weighting applied to specialist settings, recognising the significantly higher per-pupil costs they face.
In addition to this we announced a further recovery package on 2 June 2021, which provides an additional £1.4 billion to support education recovery for children aged 2 to 19 in schools, colleges and early years settings. It focuses on high quality tutoring and great teaching, where the evidence shows that this investment will have the greatest immediate impact on disadvantaged children.
The government has also invested over £400 million to support vulnerable children in England to continue their education at home. To date, over 1.3 million laptops and tablets have been delivered to schools, trusts, local authorities and further education providers.
The ongoing provision of Pupil Premium funding, which is worth £2.5 billion this financial year, aims to close the attainment gap between disadvantaged pupils and their peers. School leaders use this extra funding to tailor their support, based on the needs of their disadvantaged pupils, and invest in proven practice to improve outcomes, such as that showcased in resources published by the Education Endowment Foundation.
Asked by: Lord McNicol of West Kilbride (Labour - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask Her Majesty's Government, further to the Social Mobility Commission's report The road not taken: the drivers of course selection, published on 30 March, what steps they intend to take (1) to focus on educational inequalities up to age 16, and (2) to target specific disadvantaged groups.
Answered by Baroness Berridge
Enabling every child, irrespective of their background, to realise their potential at school has been at the centre of this government’s education policy since 2010. We do not design education policy that exclusively targets specific groups of pupils, for example based on their ethnicity or gender. Our policies are aimed at improving the education of all disadvantaged children and young people, especially as we know that their education has been impacted most heavily by the COVID-19 outbreak.
In June 2020, as part of the £1 billion Covid catch up package, we announced £350 million to fund the National Tutoring Programme for disadvantaged students for the academic years 2020/21 and 2021/22. There is extensive evidence that tutoring is one of the most effective ways to accelerate pupil progress, and we want to extend this opportunity to disadvantaged and vulnerable pupils. The programme provides additional, targeted support for those children and young people who have been hardest hit from disruption to their education as a result of school closures. Teachers and school leaders should exercise professional judgement when identifying which pupils would benefit most from this additional support. This investment was announced in tandem with the £650 million Catch-Up Premium, additional funding for all schools to support education recovery in academic year 2020/21.
On 24 February 2021, we announced a £700 million Education Recovery package, building on the £1 billion from last year. As well as a range of measures to support all pupils to recover lost learning, the package includes significant funding aimed at addressing the needs of disadvantaged pupils. This includes a new one-off £302 million Recovery Premium, which includes £22 million to scale up proven approaches, for state funded schools in the 2021/22 academic year. This grant will further support pupils who need it most. Allocations will reflect disadvantage funding eligibility and will have additional weighting applied to specialist settings, recognising the significantly higher per-pupil costs they face.
In addition to this we announced a further recovery package on 2 June 2021, which provides an additional £1.4 billion to support education recovery for children aged 2 to 19 in schools, colleges and early years settings. It focuses on high quality tutoring and great teaching, where the evidence shows that this investment will have the greatest immediate impact on disadvantaged children.
The government has also invested over £400 million to support vulnerable children in England to continue their education at home. To date, over 1.3 million laptops and tablets have been delivered to schools, trusts, local authorities and further education providers.
The ongoing provision of Pupil Premium funding, which is worth £2.5 billion this financial year, aims to close the attainment gap between disadvantaged pupils and their peers. School leaders use this extra funding to tailor their support, based on the needs of their disadvantaged pupils, and invest in proven practice to improve outcomes, such as that showcased in resources published by the Education Endowment Foundation.
Asked by: Lord McNicol of West Kilbride (Labour - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask Her Majesty's Government, further to the Social Mobility Commission's report The road not taken: the drivers of course selection, published on 30 March, what steps they intend to take (1) to promote progression routes, (2) to combine technical and academic courses, and (3) to ensure T Levels are properly recognised and fully transferable qualifications.
Answered by Baroness Berridge
The department is reviewing post-16 qualifications at level 3 and below, to ensure that every qualification approved for public funding has a distinct purpose, is high quality and supports progression to positive outcomes.
Our recent consultation on level 3 qualifications and call for evidence on study at level 2 and below set out proposals to ensure students have the best opportunities for progression into further or higher education, or into skilled employment, including support for students not ready to start level 3 at age 16. The consultation set out our proposals for clear academic and technical routes post-16, with A levels and T Levels as the qualifications of choice for each route. We are considering responses to the consultation and call for evidence, and will publish a full response to the level 3 consultation, and proposals for consultation at level 2 and below, later this year.
Alongside this, we need outstanding information, advice and guidance to support students to make the best decisions at age 16, including both academic and technical options. The Skills for Jobs White Paper set out a roadmap for how we will achieve this, including support for students to choose the route that best supports their career and study aims.
The consultation above recognised the need for mixed programmes on the academic route to allow students to combine A levels with a number of high quality alternative qualifications. T Levels are technical programmes but are classroom-based delivered by a further education provider, where students will spend 80% in the classroom and 20% on the job during an industry placement of a minimum of 315 hours.
Higher Technical Qualifications are largely classroom based, taught in further education colleges, universities or independent training providers. Although Higher Technical Qualifications are primarily designed for entry into skilled employment or those looking to retrain or upskill, they can also allow progression to further study and/or training.
T Levels, once fully rolled out, will give access to high-quality technical education for thousands of young people, so they can progress to the next level, whether that is getting a job, going on to further study or an apprenticeship. T Levels are more rigorous and substantial than most existing technical qualifications and earn UCAS points in line with 3 A levels. Therefore, we expect T Levels to provide a route into higher level technical study, including degree courses and higher apprenticeships in relevant subject areas. We are working with a wide range of higher education providers and employers to ensure that they are able to make a judgement about the suitability of T Levels for their courses and recruitment approach.
The content of T Levels has been developed in collaboration with panels of over 250 employers ranging from leading national businesses to small and medium sized enterprises. These panels set out the knowledge and skills needed to perform skilled occupations in their industry, using the approved standards which are common to apprenticeships. They also advised on specific maths, English and digital requirements necessary for occupational competence. The core content of the T Level provides underpinning knowledge and breadth of skills to support adaptability and prepare the student for work in their chosen industry. This breadth of knowledge and understanding, combined with core employability skills relevant to all occupations in the route, like problem solving, teamwork or communication skills, provides a firm foundation for a variety of roles. The occupational specialism, which students will choose, will develop technical competence in the area the student wishes to work in.
All students who take T Levels will undertake a substantial industry placement for a minimum of 45 days, so students can be confident that they will get the opportunity to gain real experience of work and develop many transferable skills that employers look for.
Asked by: Lord McNicol of West Kilbride (Labour - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask Her Majesty's Government, further to the Social Mobility Commission's report The road not taken: the drivers of course selection, published on 30 March, what steps they intend to take to reintroduce a form of Education Maintenance Allowance in England.
Answered by Baroness Berridge
The department provides a range of financial support for students to enable them to participate in post-16 education. This includes free meals, bursaries to help with the cost of education (travel, books and equipment), support for childcare and assistance with residential costs.
We have recently changed the way we allocate funding for discretionary bursaries to colleges, school sixth forms and other providers of 16-19 education, following a consultation. As a result, institutions whose students will tend to face higher travel costs, who travel further or live in rural areas, will receive more funding to provide support to students who need it. As normal with the 16-19 bursary fund, it will be for those institutions to identify which students need this support and how to provide this, for example, to purchase or contribute to the cost of a travel pass. We are now transitioning to the new allocation method, beginning in the 2020/21 academic year. Overall, this will ensure a better match between bursary allocations and the needs of students.
We have no plans to reintroduce an Education Maintenance Allowance.