Poverty and Social Exclusion

Baroness Grender Excerpts

Thursday 17th July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

The noble Baroness is completely right to concentrate on the fundamental causes of poverty, and working with youngsters is clearly right at the heart of that. That is why this Government have taken so many major steps in this area, including introducing the pupil premium and the early years pupil premium, raising teacher quality, and a number of others. I absolutely endorse her concentration on that area.

[Baroness Grender (LD)]

My Lords, given the importance afforded to education in this report, will the Minister also look at the welcome news in the Ofsted report published yesterday, that there is now evidence that the pupil premium is closing the attainment gap between children who have free school meals and their peers?

[Lord Freud]

It is clearly vital, as my noble friend says, to close the gap. There are lots of interesting statistics, particularly about what is happening in the London schools that are outperforming—although we do not know exactly how that has happened, and it is vital that we find out. It is the London Challenge, and there are quite a lot of analyses of exactly why that has come about.