Baroness Davies of Devonport

Local authorities are responsible for ensuring there are sufficient places to deliver the childcare entitlements and give every child the best start in life. The department maintains close contact with local authorities to monitor sufficiency of childcare in their area, ensuring challenges are identified early and support is provided where needed.

We continue to work with local authorities to strengthen sufficiency planning, and improve data on the availability of suitable places, including for those needing specialist support.

We have seen significant growth in the early years workforce and continue to help people discover rewarding early years careers through the ‘Do something Big’ recruitment campaign, building on our pilot to offer financial incentives to attract and retain the best educators and introducing flexibilities for childminders.

We also recently published our early years funding consultation, which sets out our vision for a reformed early years funding system for the early years entitlements, alongside proposals for transition in 2027/28.

The department is investing over £1 billion for PE and school sport over three years, including £530 million for a new PE and School Sport Partnerships Network. Detailed design and funding allocations will be confirmed through the procurement process, but the approach will focus on ensuring support reaches those most in need.

Despite sustained investment through the PE and sport premium for over a decade, less than half of children are meeting the Chief Medical Officer’s recommendation of 60 active minutes a day. In addition, persistent inequalities remain, with groups such as girls and those from disadvantaged and ethnically diverse backgrounds.

The department’s new approach, which is supported by the major sports governing bodies and the wider school sport sector, focuses on securing higher quality PE and school sport for all children and reducing inactivity amongst those who are currently least active.

It combines both a universal offer to all primary and secondary schools, which includes school requested intervention, plus targeted direct support for those schools and pupils who will benefit from it the most. This includes coaching, swimming provision and support to open facilities, as well as stronger links to extracurricular sport and local clubs. We will also provide targeted funding for schools to test and share effective practice, alongside more accessible programmes from National Governing Bodies and clearer pathways into community sport. Provision will be informed by baseline and ongoing needs assessments led by a national delivery partner.

To support schools with the transition to this new approach, the government has committed to a transitional premium payment of £150 million for the 2026/27 academic year.

In response to longstanding calls from schools, we are also investing almost £200 million in capital funding to go towards improving school sporting facilities.

It is unacceptable that women can wait a long time for an endometriosis diagnosis and we are committed to improving waiting times for diagnosis and treatment so patients can get the care they need sooner.

The Renewed Women’s Health Strategy commits to speeding up diagnosis and access to treatment for conditions including endometriosis.

Clinical pathways for heavy periods and pelvic pain, which can be a sign of endometriosis, will be redesigned to reduce repeat appointments, unnecessary referrals, and long waits.

This will create roadmaps for health systems to use and adapt for local needs that will enable women to move more quickly through the system and reach the level of care they need with fewer appointments. These redesigned pathways will also help systems to transform services, plan their workforce, and consider where capacity is most usefully deployed so that hospitals can provide the specialist care they are designed to, and move more care, where appropriate, into the community.

Women with endometriosis will benefit from single points of access for gynaecology referrals and a shift away from hospital-only care towards neighbourhood and community settings.

As part of the Renewed Women's Health Strategy, we also committed to publishing an equity good practice guide to enable integrated care boards (ICBs) to better understand and reduce inequalities in heavy periods. Heavy periods are a key symptom of endometriosis, and this will enable ICBs to take targeted action to improve care and reduce disparities for women experiencing heavy periods and related gynaecological conditions.

Menstrual problems, including those caused by endometriosis, are prioritised as one of the first pathways to be delivered through community-based services and the new virtual hospital, NHS Online.

NHS Online will give people on certain pathways the choice of getting the specialist care they need from their home. It will connect patients with clinicians across the country through secure, online appointments accessed through the NHS App.

NHS Online will help to reduce patient waiting times, delivering the equivalent of up to 8.5 million appointments and assessments in its first three years, four times more than an average trust, while enhancing patient choice and control over their care.

It is important that all women and babies receive safe, equitable, and compassionate care, regardless of where they live. All local areas have equity and equality action plans in place, which set out tailored interventions that tackle inequalities for women and babies from ethnic backgrounds and those living in the most deprived areas.

NHS England receives annual national surveillance reports from Mothers and Babies: Reducing Risk through Audits and Confidential Enquiries across the UK (MBRRACE-UK), which provide comprehensive assessments of maternal safety outcomes, including regional variation, inequalities, and risk factors associated with poor outcomes. These reports identify areas where disparities exist and inform national and regional improvement priorities.

Findings and recommendations from the reports are shared with accountable National Health Service leadership teams, which are responsible for implementing targeted improvement actions to reduce unwarranted variation, address inequalities, and improve the safety and quality of maternity care across England.

The Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) Strategy sets out a ten-year vision to halve VAWG in a decade.

We are ensuring effective delivery of this through a rigorous cross-government governance structure. Ministers from across government departments meet on a bi-monthly basis to review progress, provide updates on delivery of their commitments as outlined in the action plan and unblock barriers to delivery.

We are measuring our progress through the performance framework, which is outlined in the VAWG Strategy. This includes a package of cross-government metrics that will monitor progress against the overall strategy.