Race Disparity Audit

Emma Little Pengelly Excerpts

Tuesday 10th October 2017 Commons Chamber

[Damian Green]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for raising an important point. Action that is taken at a local level—perhaps in an individual school—can be transformative for the lives of thousands of people. The audit will enable us to identify the areas with problems in a more fine-grain way than ever before, so that we can deal with those problems, whether they relate to education, employment and training or policing, in the areas where that action can have most effect. That will be how we can make the most beneficial difference to most people’s lives.

[Emma Little Pengelly (Belfast South) (DUP)]

I thank the First Secretary of State for his statement. For some considerable time, black and white British boys in receipt of free school meals have had some of the lowest levels of educational achievement across the United Kingdom, and that is also the case in Northern Ireland. I welcome this initiative, but the data will be of value only if the analysis is mainstreamed into policy making in Departments. What do the Government intend to do to ensure that that happens?

[Damian Green]

Much good work has been done in Northern Ireland in that field, and we will continue to spread best practice and learn from where we have had successes. Making that part of mainstream policy making is one of way of doing that. The hon. Lady mentioned educational attainment, and it will be interesting to see the evidence from free schools in the years ahead. I suspect that they will be shown to do particularly well by pupils with various forms of disadvantage, but we will develop the evidence over time and we will base our policy on evidence—[Interruption.] I can tell from the noise level that the Labour party has already come to a view about free schools without any evidence. That is typical of why their policy making is always so bad—[Interruption.]