Asked by: Michelle Welsh (Labour - Sherwood Forest)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps she plans to take to help alleviate child poverty in Sherwood Forest constituency.
Answered by Catherine McKinnell - Minister of State (Education)
Tackling child poverty everywhere is at the heart of breaking down barriers to opportunity and improving the life chances for every child. For too many children, living in poverty robs them of the opportunity to learn and to prosper.
Child poverty has gone up by 700,000 since 2010, with over four million children now growing up in a low-income family. This not only harms children’s lives now, but it also damages their future prospects and holds back our society and economy.
On 17 July 2024, my right hon. Friend, the Prime Minister, announced the appointment of the Secretary of State for Work and Pension and the Secretary of State for Education to be the joint leads of a new ministerial taskforce to begin work on a child poverty strategy.
The ministerial taskforce, which met for the first time on 14 August 2024, will harness all available levers to drive forward short-term and long-term actions across government to reduce child poverty, with a child poverty strategy published in spring next year. Further details on the taskforce can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/child-poverty-taskforce-kicks-off-urgent-work-to-publish-strategy-in-spring.
The proposed Children’s Wellbeing Bill will ensure education and children’s social care systems transform life chances for millions of children and young people in England.
The department will remove barriers to opportunity to ensure the school system is fair for every child. As announced in the King’s Speech, under the Children‘s Wellbeing Bill, every primary school in England, will offer a free breakfast club. They will play an important role in driving up standards of attendance and attainment, ensuring children are able to listen and concentrate throughout the school day. Alongside removing a barrier to opportunity for every child and supporting families with the cost of living, breakfast clubs will also offer parents more choices in childcare. To ensure that every child, no matter their background, is well prepared for the school day, the department will limit the number of branded uniform items that a school can require.
In addition to free school meals and the over £2.9 billion pupil premium funding, the department has also provided over £200 million of funding this year to all local authorities across England to deliver the holiday activities and food (HAF) programme in their area. This is to ensure that over the longer school holidays, children from disadvantaged backgrounds and low-income families are able to take up free childcare spaces, which offer healthy meals and enriching activities, benefiting their health, wellbeing and learning. This summer, the department anticipated that over three million HAF places would be provided to young people in this country.
Asked by: Michelle Welsh (Labour - Sherwood Forest)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what the level of real-terms funding per pupil in (a) primary and (b) secondary school in Sherwood Forest constituency was in each financial year since 2010.
Answered by Catherine McKinnell - Minister of State (Education)
The table below provides per pupil funding units from academic years 2020/21 to 2024/25, which represents the funding provided for schools in Sherwood Forest constituency.
The department cannot provide comparable funding data for each of the last 10 years due to the changes in the funding system since that time. The scope of the per-pupil funding before and after academic year 2018/19 are not directly comparable. In particular, funding for the central services provided by local authorities was split out from the schools block funding in 2018/19, and instead funded separately through the central school services block from that year onwards.
The constituency level data for Sherwood Forest is calculated based on the notional schools national funding formula (NFF) allocations for all mainstream schools in the constituency.
The figures in the table below are provided on a cash basis. We also publish real-terms statistics on schools funding at the national level which does not distinguish by phase. We use the GDP deflator to calculate real-terms funding levels. These can be found on the following links: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/school-funding-statistics and https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/methodology/school-funding-statistics-methodology.
Year | NFF Schools Block per-pupil funding * | |
Primary | Secondary | |
2020-21 | £4,458 | £5,575 |
2021-22 | £4,598 | £5,749 |
2022-23 | £4,712 | £5,949 |
2023-24 | £4,934 | £6,300 |
2024-25 | £5,179 | £6,605 |
* The allocations that schools within a constituency actually receive are determined by the local funding formula in their area. Additional grants, such as the School Supplementary grant (SSG) and the Mainstream Schools Additional grant (MSAG) are included in these figures once they have been incorporated into the Dedicated Schools Grant.
For the 2020/21 to 2023/24 academic years, Sherwood constituency has been used. 2024/25 uses the new constituency boundaries which formed Sherwood Forest.