Asked by: Adrian Ramsay (Green Party - Waveney Valley)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, how many how many schools closed as a consequence of extreme heat in the week commencing 22 June 2026.
Answered by Josh MacAlister - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Education)
Schools have a duty to provide daily attendance data to the department. Attendance data is published on a fortnightly basis and can be found here: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/pupil-attendance-in-schools/releases. Attendance data for the week commencing 22 June 2026 will be published on 9 July 2026.
It is for individual settings and responsible bodies to determine their approach to closure based on their own risk assessment. Closures should be considered a last resort, and the imperative is for settings to remain open where it is safe to do so.
Schools play an important safeguarding role and access to education remains a priority for pupils’ wellbeing and safety. Settings should seek to remain open and manage high temperatures through practical adjustments. There is currently no requirement for them to notify the government if they decide to close.
Where settings are temporarily closed, they should provide remote education for the duration of the closure, in line with the department’s guidance on providing remote education for schools, which is available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/providing-remote-education-guidance-for-schools.
Where possible, pupils should receive regular teaching and interaction with teachers, including live or structured input alongside independent work.
Asked by: Adrian Ramsay (Green Party - Waveney Valley)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, with reference to the Sutton Trust’s Selective Inclusion report, what assessment she has made of the extent to which low-income pupils with SEND are currently underrepresented in the top-performing comprehensive schools.
Answered by Georgia Gould - Minister of State (Education)
The School Admissions Code requires admission arrangements to be fair, clear and objective. A school must admit a child where it is named in the child’s education health and care plan.
The ‘Every Child Achieving and Thriving’ White Paper sets out the government’s commitment to developing new resources to support and encourage schools to use existing provisions within the Code, such as a pupil premium priority, to adopt more inclusive admission arrangements. We have also committed to strengthen scrutiny of all pupil movement including unacceptable off-rolling practice by developing a new, internal dashboard that identifies school level trends in how children move through the education system, paying particular attention to schools where special educational needs and disabilities, free school meals or demographic trends appear significantly out of sync with their local context.
Asked by: Adrian Ramsay (Green Party - Waveney Valley)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, when the Kinship Allowance Pilot will commence; and when she plans to publish the list of the ten selected local authorities participating in that pilot.
Answered by Josh MacAlister - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Education)
The department announced on 27 February that the Kinship Allowance pilot will be delivered through the new Kinship Zones programme, which will operate in seven local authority areas: Bexley, Bolton, Newcastle, North East Lincolnshire, Medway, Thurrock and Wiltshire.
Delivery of support through the Kinship Zones will begin on 1 April 2026, with local authorities leading engagement with eligible kinship families ahead of the rollout.
The seven participating local authorities were selected following last year’s expression of interest process. The final seven were selected because they provided the strongest conditions for generating robust evidence across a diverse range of local contexts and helping the maximum number of children while remaining within budget constraints.
Details of the participating areas have already been published, and further information about the wider Kinship Zones programme is available here: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-launches-investment-in-support-for-kinship-carers.