Asked by: Charlotte Cane (Liberal Democrat - Ely and East Cambridgeshire)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps she is taking to ensure that Skills England is subject to parliamentary scrutiny.
Answered by Janet Daby - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Education)
As an Executive Agency, Skills England will be subject to clear requirements on governance, transparency and accountability as set out by the Cabinet Office and applying across government.
A sponsor Minister within the department will be accountable to Parliament on all matters concerning Skills England, including the policy framework within which it operates, ensuring it meets its strategic objectives and, in doing so, delivers value for money.
Skills England will be led by a Chief Executive, who will be directly accountable to a relevant departmental sponsor Minister for delivery and day to day activities. They will also be accountable to the sponsor department’s Permanent Secretary for responsible use of public funds, via formal designation as Accounting Officer for the agency.
A framework document will be agreed between the department and Skills England, which will be approved by HM Treasury. This will set out the governance and accountability framework within which Skills England and the department will operate and will be publicly available.
In line with other Executive Agencies, and as set out in the Public Bodies Handbook, Skills England will regularly publish information on the execution of its functions. This will include an annual report, which sponsor ministers are required to publish to ensure Parliament is kept informed of Skills England’s activities.
The IfATE (Transfer of Functions etc) Bill also requires my right hon. Friend, the Secretary of State for Education, to publish and lay before Parliament, within six months after the closure of IfATE, a report setting out which of the functions in this Bill are being exercised by Skills England and the impact of this on apprenticeships and technical education in England.
Asked by: Charlotte Cane (Liberal Democrat - Ely and East Cambridgeshire)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps she is taking to improve recruitment in the early years sector.
Answered by Stephen Morgan - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Education)
The early years workforce is at the heart of the government’s mission to give every child the best start in life and deliver the Plan for Change. The department is determined to create change in the approach to early years, focusing on high-quality early education, celebrating early years careers and embedding the sector into the wider education system. Later this year, we will publish a strategy to reform early years education, including the workforce.
The government is supporting the sector to attract talented staff and childminders by creating conditions for improved recruitment and new routes into the workforce. Our national recruitment campaign is encouraging the public to ‘Do something BIG’ and start a career working with small children, and a dedicated campaign website is helping people to find out more about gaining qualifications and to search existing job vacancies. We are also piloting whether £1,000 financial incentives will boost recruitment in early years and have been running a childminder start-up grant scheme. Finally, we have introduced new routes into the workforce including Skills Bootcamps, which are free, flexible, employer-led courses that lead to accelerated apprenticeships.
Retaining and maximising the staff already in the workforce is also of vital importance. Through the experience-based route, providers will be able to maximise the potential of their staff who have the right skills and experience but do not hold an approved qualification. We have also taken steps to increase the graduate workforce via the early years teacher degree apprenticeship, providing a new undergraduate route to gaining early years teacher status.
Asked by: Charlotte Cane (Liberal Democrat - Ely and East Cambridgeshire)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment she has made of the adequacy of levels of breakfast club funding.
Answered by Stephen Morgan - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Education)
Over 750 early adopter schools are now delivering free breakfast clubs across the country as part of a test and learn phase before further rollout of the programme. The department has used existing programmes and costs to determine the funding rates for early adopter schools, which have been tested and refined with a number of schools. An average school with 50% take up on the early adopter scheme would receive around £23,000 for a full year.
We will be working closely with the early adopter schools to test how they utilise the funding, which includes food, delivery and staffing costs. The department has a robust strategy in place to capture and analyse this data.
Asked by: Charlotte Cane (Liberal Democrat - Ely and East Cambridgeshire)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps her Department is taking to support the mental health and well-being of school students.
Answered by Stephen Morgan - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Education)
This government is committed to improving mental health support for all children and young people. This is critical to high and rising standards in schools and breaking down barriers to opportunity, helping pupils to achieve and thrive in education.
That is why the government will provide access to specialist mental health professionals in every school, so every child and young person has access to early support to address problems before they escalate. Mental Health Support Teams continue to roll out in schools and colleges across the country and are expected to cover at least 50% of pupils this year.
The government will also recruit an additional 8,500 new mental health staff to treat children and adults, and open new Young Futures hubs with access to mental health support workers.
To support education staff, the department provides a range of guidance and practical resources on promoting and supporting pupils’ mental health and wellbeing, such as a resources hub for mental health leads and a toolkit to help schools choose evidence-based early support for pupils.
Asked by: Charlotte Cane (Liberal Democrat - Ely and East Cambridgeshire)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what recent assessment she has made of the trends in the level of teacher recruitment.
Answered by Catherine McKinnell - Minister of State (Education)
High-quality teaching is the biggest in-school factor that makes a difference to a child’s education, so having sufficient expert teachers is critical to the government’s mission to break down barriers to opportunity and boost the life chances for every child. This government has inherited a system with critical shortages of teachers, with numbers not keeping pace with demographic changes.
Information on the school workforce, including the number of teachers entering and leaving service in state-funded schools, is published in the ‘School workforce in England’ statistical publication which is available here: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/school-workforce-in-england.
Under the previous government, the rates and numbers of entrants to the state-funded teaching profession in England decreased in 2023/24, while the rates and numbers of leavers from to the state-funded teaching profession in England remained stable. While leavers have returned to pre-pandemic levels, entrants have returned to figures similar to the 2021/22 academic year. Each year, the number of teachers entering state-funded schools in England is higher than those leaving.
With regards recruitment of trainee teachers, information on the numbers and characteristics of new entrants to initial teacher training (ITT) in England is published in the ‘ITT census’ statistical publication which is available here: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/initial-teacher-training-census.
In 2024/25, there were 27,836 new entrants to ITT, a 6% increase compared to the revised figure of 26,376 in 2023/24. This reverses a trend of year-on-year decreases since the pandemic period with a high of 40,377 new entrants in 2020/21. Despite the increase in the latest year, numbers of entrants remain below pre-pandemic levels.
Postgraduate ITT targets for 2024/25 were set using analysis from the Teacher Workforce Model which can be viewed here: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/postgraduate-initial-teacher-training-targets.
The percentage of the postgraduate ITT target achieved for all subjects (secondary and primary) was 69%. This is an increase of 9 percentage points, up from 60% in 2023/24.
The department is committed to recruiting an additional 6,500 new expert teachers across our schools, both mainstream and specialist, and our colleges over the course of this Parliament, which is why this government accepted the School Teachers’ Review Body’s recommendation of a 5.5% pay award for teachers and leaders in maintained schools from last September. To further boost recruitment, we announced an ITT financial incentives package for the 2025/26 recruitment cycle worth £233 million, a £37 million increase on the last cycle. This includes a range of measures, including bursaries worth £29,000 tax-free and scholarships worth £31,000 tax-free, to encourage talented trainees to train in key subjects such as mathematics, physics, chemistry and computing.
Asked by: Charlotte Cane (Liberal Democrat - Ely and East Cambridgeshire)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, whether her Department is taking steps to help increase access to (a) technical and (b) vocational pathways for (i) training and (ii) employment in the chemical sciences sector.
Answered by Janet Daby - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Education)
I refer the hon. Member for Ely and East Cambridgeshire to the answer of 19 February 2025 to Question 30787.
Asked by: Charlotte Cane (Liberal Democrat - Ely and East Cambridgeshire)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps she is taking to ensure the availability of high-quality childcare.
Answered by Stephen Morgan - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Education)
It is the department’s ambition that parents have access to high-quality, affordable and flexible early education and childcare.
Next year alone, we plan to provide over £8 billion for the early years entitlements, which is a more than 30% increase compared to 2024/25, as we roll out the expansion of the entitlements, so eligible working parents of children aged from nine months can access 30 hours of funded childcare.
From the start of September 2024, eligible working parents have been entitled to 15 hours a week of early education and care from the term after their child turns nine months. So far, over 320,000 additional parents are now accessing a place. Going further, from September 2025, eligible working parents will be able to access 30 hours of early education and childcare a week, over 38 weeks of the year, from the term after their child turns nine months until they start school.
In September 2024, my right hon. Friend, the Secretary of State for Education announced that state-funded primary phase schools could apply for up to £150,000 of £15 million capital funding to create or expand on-site nurseries. Schools could apply between 17 October and 19 December 2024 and will be notified of the outcome in this year. This new funding will complement ongoing work to expand provision across the country, including the £100 million capital funding allocated to local authorities in 2023/24 to increase capacity of early years and wraparound provision in local areas.
Parents may also be eligible for childcare support through Tax-Free Childcare or Universal Credit Childcare.
The department is determined to create change in the approach to early years, focusing on high-quality early education, celebrating and supporting early years careers, and embedding the sector into the wider education system. We are delivering programmes to support the sector to attract talented staff and childminders by creating conditions for improved recruitment, alongside programmes to better utilise the skills of the existing workforce.
The department also wants to ensure that parents are aware of and accessing all government-funded childcare support they are eligible for. We are raising awareness of the government-funded childcare support available via the Childcare Choices website to stimulate increased take-up by eligible families, because this could make a significant financial difference to families.
Asked by: Charlotte Cane (Liberal Democrat - Ely and East Cambridgeshire)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps her Department is taking to help tackle persistent absence among young carers.
Answered by Stephen Morgan - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Education)
The department wants to ensure that young carers have the best life chances by supporting them in their education. We recognise that absence from school is almost always a symptom of wider needs and barriers that a family is facing. It is often the best early indication of need in a family that may not be in contact with other services.
The department’s expectations of local authorities and schools, as set out in the ‘Working together to improve school attendance’ guidance, were made statutory on 19 August 2024. The ‘support-first’ ethos of the attendance guidance is that pupils and families, including young carers, should receive holistic, whole-family support to help them overcome the barriers to attendance they are facing. This includes holding regular meetings with the families of pupils who the school, and/or local authority, consider to be vulnerable, to discuss attendance and engagement at school. Schools are expected to recognise that absence is a symptom and that improving pupil’s attendance is part of supporting the pupil’s overall welfare.
Young carers are also now part of the school census, which will improve their visibility in the school system and allow schools to better identify and support their young carers. This will provide an annual data collection to establish long term trends. Separately, the department also publishes daily attendance data on a fortnightly basis and will continue to monitor the quality of data on young carers that is collected via the school register for consideration to include in the daily data collection in the future.
Schools can also use pupil premium funding to support other pupils with identified needs, including young carers. Pupil premium funding has increased to over £2.9 billion for the 2024/25 financial year.
Asked by: Charlotte Cane (Liberal Democrat - Ely and East Cambridgeshire)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, whether she has made an assessment of the potential merits of expanding the eligibility criteria for free school meals.
Answered by Stephen Morgan - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Education)
Under current programmes, 2.1 million disadvantaged pupils are registered to receive benefits-based free school meals (FSM). An additional 1.3 million are eligible for a free meal under universal infant free school meals.
The government is committed to delivering an ambitious strategy to reduce child poverty by tackling the root causes and giving every child the best start in life. To support this, a new Ministerial taskforce has been set up to develop a Child Poverty Strategy. The taskforce will consider a range of policies, assessing what will have the greatest impact in driving down rates of child poverty. As with all policies, the government keeps the approach to FSM under review.
Asked by: Charlotte Cane (Liberal Democrat - Ely and East Cambridgeshire)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps her Department is taking to support the mental health and well-being of school students.
Answered by Stephen Morgan - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Education)
I refer the hon. Member for Ely and East Cambridgeshire to the answer of 4 March 2025 to Question 33348.