Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, whether she has plans to introduce monitoring arrangements to assess compliance with the updated school food standards once they are in force.

Answered by Olivia Bailey - Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State (Department for Education) (Equalities)

The department aims to revise the School Food Standards and is engaging with stakeholders to ensure they support our work to create the healthiest generation of children in history.

School governors and trustees have a statutory duty to ensure compliance, holding school leaders to account for meeting the School Food Standards. Through our review, we will engage with the sector on a range of matters, including improving compliance.

Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, when he plans to launch the consultation on updating school food standards.

Answered by Olivia Bailey - Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State (Department for Education) (Equalities)

The department aims to revise the school food standards and is engaging with stakeholders to ensure they support our work to create the healthiest generation of children in history. We intend to consult on these revisions and further details on timings will be available in due course.

Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment she has made of the potential merits of reviewing the No Recourse to Public Funds income thresholds to ensure equity of eligibility for all children when expanding access to the free school meals to children from families in receipt of universal credit.

Answered by Olivia Bailey - Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State (Department for Education) (Equalities)

The department has permanently extended free school meal eligibility to children in all households with no recourse to public funds, provided they meet income thresholds set out in public guidance.

This ensures that children can access support regardless of their background or circumstances, including the immigration status of their parents.

The income thresholds for No Recourse to Public Funds (NRPF) households were designed to account for the differences in household income between NRPF households and those with access to additional state support to ensure parity.

The government has set out plans to extend free school meals to all children from households in receipt of Universal Credit from September 2026. The department continues to keep all aspects of the free school meals system under review.

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what progress his Department has made on developing national guidance for Auditory Verbal therapy for deaf children since March 2025; and whether he plans to establish a timeline for publishing that guidance.

Answered by Zubir Ahmed - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)

Integrated care boards (ICBs) are responsible for the provision and commissioning of services to meet the needs of their local populations, including services for non-hearing children. NHS England supports ICBs to make informed decisions about the provision of audiology services so that they can provide consistent, high quality, and integrated care.

Auditory verbal therapy (AVT) is one type of therapy to support children with hearing loss, and it is important that local commissioners have the discretion to decide how best to meet the needs of their local population, informed by the best available evidence and guidance.

Based on consideration of the current evidence on AVT for deaf children, NHS England has no plans to develop such national guidance. In November 2025, NHS England appointed two national specialty advisers for hearing and associated conditions who are considering care pathway improvements for hearing services. The national speciality advisors are committed to meeting with the charity Auditory Verbal UK (AVUK) to discuss AVT, with a meeting scheduled.

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence’s prioritisation board considered childhood hearing loss as a potential guideline topic in August 2024, but concluded that there is limited evidence available in this area and that the 2015 NHS England Action Plan on Hearing Loss and guidance issued in 2019 addresses care for this population, and it is understood that AVUK are in the process of developing the evidence base for the intervention. The NHS England Action Plan on Hearing Loss is available at the following link:

https://www.england.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/act-plan-hearing-loss-upd.pdf

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