Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Rebecca Long Bailey and Nick Gibb

Monday 17th April 2023 Commons Chamber

[Rebecca Long Bailey (Salford and Eccles) (Lab)]

5. What steps her Department is taking to tackle the disadvantage gap in schools.

[The Minister for Schools (Nick Gibb)]

Closing the attainment gap between disadvantaged and non-disadvantaged pupils has been the guiding star leading all our education reforms since 2010. Central to that has been ensuring that children are taught to read in the first years of primary school using systematic phonics, the method that all the evidence says is the most effective way to teach children to read. In PIRLS, the progress in international reading literacy study of the reading ability of nine-year-olds, England rose from joint 10th to joint eighth in 2016, which is largely attributable to improvements in reading by the least able children.

[Rebecca Long Bailey]

The Minister paints a rosy picture, but the disadvantage gap continues to be wider than it was in 2019 and the Government have limited the uptake of education recovery programmes, such as the national tutoring programme, and failed to ensure that tutoring was always directed towards the most disadvantaged pupils. Worse still, they have provided less than a third of the funding that their own education recovery commissioner recommended. Will the Minister commit today to increasing funding to meet these urgent needs?

[Nick Gibb]

During the eight years prior to the pandemic, the disadvantage gap closed by 13% in primary schools and by 9% in secondary schools by 2019. The hon. Lady is right that the gap widened over the course of the pandemic, which is why we introduced the national tutoring programme, providing intensive one-to-one and small group tuition to those who have fallen behind. It is why altogether we are spending £5 billion on an ambitious multi-year education recovery plan, why the recovery premium is targeted towards the most disadvantaged and why the pupil premium, introduced by the Conservative-led Government in 2010, is being increased from £2.6 billion to £2.9 billion this year.