Asked by: Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Labour - Slough)
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 in schools in Slough constituency.
Answered by Stephen Morgan - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Education)
This government is determined to tackle the generational challenge of school absence which is a fundamental barrier to learning and life chances. Missing school regularly is harmful to a child’s attainment, safety and physical and mental health, which limits their opportunity to succeed. There is evidence that more students are attending school this year compared to last, thanks to the sector’s efforts although around 1.6 million children remain persistently absent and miss 10% or more of lessons.
The department has a national approach to supporting all schools to tackle absence, including those in the Slough constituency. Central to this approach are stronger expectations of local authorities and schools, as set out in the ‘Working together to improve school attendance’ guidance, which was made statutory on 19 August 2024. The guidance promotes a 'support first' approach, encouraging schools, trusts and local authorities to work with families in addressing attendance barriers.
Every state school in England should now be sharing their daily attendance register data with the department, local authorities and trusts. These bodies can access this data through a secure, interactive dashboard which is maintained by the department, allowing them to target attendance interventions more effectively.
The department recognises the importance of creating opportunities within the sector to share existing best practice on how to improve attendance. This is why the department has set up a network of 31 attendance hubs, who have offered support to 2000 schools and shared their strategies and resources for improving attendance.
In addition to this work, the department also aims to improve the existing evidence on which interventions work to improve attendance. Over £17 million is being invested across two mentoring projects that will support at least 12,000 pupils in 15 areas. These programmes will be evaluated and the effective practice shared with schools and local authorities nationally.
From early 2025, new Regional Improvement for Standards and Excellence (RISE) teams will support all state schools by facilitating networking, sharing best practice across areas, including attendance, and empowering schools to feel they can better access support and learn from one another. For schools requiring more intensive support, RISE teams and supporting organisations will work collaboratively with their responsible body to agree bespoke packages of targeted support, based on a school’s particular circumstances.
School attendance is also supported by broader investments, such as funded breakfast clubs, across all primary schools to ensure children start their day ready to learn. The department will also initiate new annual Ofsted reviews focusing on safeguarding, attendance and off-rolling.
We are working across government on plans to provide access to specialist mental health professionals in every school, new Young Futures hubs, including access to mental health support workers, and an additional 8,500 new mental health staff to treat children and adults.
Data published in May this year showed that, in Slough local authority, 42% of schools and colleges worked with a Mental Health Support Team in March 2024 compared to 34% nationally, and 78% of schools and colleges had signed up for a senior mental health lead training grant, compared to 74% nationally.
Schools can also allocate pupil premium funding, which has now increased to over £2.9 billion for the 2024/25 financial year, to support pupils with identified needs to attend school regularly.
Asked by: Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Labour - Slough)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps she is taking with Cabinet colleagues to tackle the impact of socio-economic disadvantage on future earnings.
Answered by Catherine McKinnell - Minister of State (Education)
Every child should have every opportunity to succeed, no matter who they are, where they are from, or how much their parents earn. Too often opportunity for children and young people is defined by their background.
That is why this government is committed to breaking the link between a child’s background and their future success. The Opportunity Mission will set every child up for the best start in life, help every child to achieve and thrive at school, build skills for opportunity and growth, and build family security, tackling the underlying barriers to opportunity that hold too many children and young people back. The Plan for Change sets out more details on our priorities for the Opportunity Mission: https://www.gov.uk/missions.
Tackling child poverty 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.
On 23 October 2024 the government published ‘Tackling Child Poverty: Developing Our Strategy’, which sets out how the government will develop the Strategy, which will harness all available levers to deliver a reduction in child poverty this parliament as part of an ambitious ten year strategy. The report is available here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/tackling-child-poverty-developing-our-strategy.
The Strategy will look at levers across four key themes of increasing incomes, reducing essential costs, increasing financial resilience, and better local support, especially in the early years.
This government will also, at last, commence the socio-economic duty in Section 1 of the Equality Act 2010. The duty will require public bodies, when making strategic decisions, to actively consider how their decisions might help to reduce the inequalities associated with socio-economic disadvantage. We will be updating Parliament on this in due course.
Asked by: Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Labour - Slough)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what estimate she has made of the number of young people out of (a) work, (b) education and (c) training in Slough.
Answered by Janet Daby - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Education)
The department publishes statistics on those not in education, employment or training (NEET) for England from the labour force survey (LFS) for young people aged 16 to 24. The statistics are available here: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/neet-statistics-annual-brief.
The number of 16 to 24-year-olds estimated as NEET in England at the end of 2023 is estimated to be 709,600 (11.9% of the population). However, these estimates are only published at national level due to limitations with sample sizes for lower-level geographies. Therefore, NEET rates for young people aged 16 to 24 in Slough cannot be provided.
However, local authorities are required to encourage, enable or assist young people’s participation in education or training and return management information for young people aged 16 and 17. This data is published here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/neet-and-participation-local-authority-figures. The data shows that of the 4,435 young people aged 16 and 17 years old who were known to Slough local authority at the end of 2022 (average of December 2022, January 2023 and February 2023), 217 were NEET or their activity was not known (117 known to be NEET and 100 young people for whom the local authority could not confirm their activity). These statistics are published as transparency data so some caution should be taken if using these figures.
Asked by: Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Labour - Slough)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, how many children living in relative poverty are not eligible for free school meals.
Answered by Stephen Morgan - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Education)
The new government has a central mission to break down barriers to opportunity for every child.
The government has inherited a trend of rising child poverty and widening attainment gaps between children eligible for free school meals (FSM) and their peers. Child poverty has increased by 700,000 since 2010, with over four million children now growing up in a low-income family. 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 at life. To support this, a new ministerial taskforce has been set up to develop a Child Poverty Strategy, which will be published in spring 2025. The taskforce will consider a range of policies in assessing what will have the greatest impact in driving down rates of child poverty.
A formal assessment has not been made of the number of children living in relative poverty who are eligible to receive FSM. As with all policies, the government keeps the approach to FSM under review.
Asked by: Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Labour - Slough)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps is she taking increase school attendance among children who are living in poverty.
Answered by Stephen Morgan - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Education)
Today, 4.3 million children are living in poverty in this country. Tackling child poverty 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.
To support the educational outcomes of disadvantaged pupils, pupil premium funding in the 2024/25 financial year has increased to over £2.9 billion. Pupil premium funding is allocated to eligible schools based on the number of pupils who are recorded as eligible for free school meals (FSM) or have been recorded as eligible in the past six years (referred to as Ever 6 FSM), as well as children who are looked after by the local authority or have been adopted from or left care. In line with the pupil premium Menu of Approaches, schools can spend their pupil premium on evidence-based strategies to support attendance.
This government will ensure school is the best place to be for every child, with free breakfast clubs in primary schools so that every child is on time and ready to learn, better mental health support through access to specialist mental health professionals in every school, and inclusion for children with special educational needs and disabilities within mainstream settings right across the age range.
Backed by £15 million, the department is also expanding its investment into attendance mentoring to reach 10,000 more children and cover an additional ten areas. These attendance mentors will provide one-to-one targeted support for persistently and severely absent pupils.
There is an absence epidemic in this country, with one in five children persistently absent. The department’s ‘Working together to improve school attendance’ statutory guidance sets a clear expectations that where pupils face additional barriers which affect their attendance, schools should work with these families and put support in place to help them to attend. The guidance can be found here: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/66bf300da44f1c4c23e5bd1b/Working_together_to_improve_school_attendance_-_August_2024.pdf. Where the barriers are outside of the school’s control, all local partners should work together to support pupils and parents to access support to ensure regular attendance.
Asked by: Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Labour - Slough)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, how their Department defines strategy.
Answered by Janet Daby - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Education)
The definition is detailed in the Functional Standards Common Glossary, which is published on the GOV.UK website.
Asked by: Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Labour - Slough)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, how many university (a) biology, (b) chemistry and (c) physics departments (i) opened and (ii) closed in the last five years.
Answered by Janet Daby - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Education)
The government is committed to promoting science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education and skills to ensure the UK remains competitive in the global economy.
Universities operate as autonomous institutions, therefore specific data on the number of university biology, chemistry and physics departments that have opened and/or closed in the last five years is not collected or maintained by the department.
The government recognises the financial environment of the higher education sector is increasingly challenging and the department is aware that some providers are making difficult decisions in order to safeguard their financial sustainability. The department is committed to working with the sector to create a secure future for our world-leading universities.
Asked by: Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Labour - Slough)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what the average staff to student ratio was in secondary schools in Slough constituency in each year since 2015.
Answered by Catherine McKinnell - Minister of State (Education)
Information on the school workforce, including the pupil to adult and pupil to teacher ratios at national, regional, local authority and individual school level, is published in the ‘School Workforce in England’ statistical publication, found here: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/school-workforce-in-england.
In the 2023/24 academic year, which is the latest data available, the ratio of pupils to teachers (qualified and unqualified) was 16.8 in state-funded secondary schools in England, the same as the previous year. The ratio of pupils to adults (excluding auxiliary staff) was 12.0 to one in state-funded secondary schools in England, again the same as the previous year.
The attached table provides the pupil to adult ratio and the pupil to teacher ratio for state-funded secondary schools in Slough constituency and England for the 2015/16 to 2023/24 academic years.
Asked by: Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Labour - Slough)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, whether the rate paid to nursery providers for free hours childcare will increase proportionately to cover the increase in employer national insurance contributions.
Answered by Stephen Morgan - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Education)
I refer the hon. Member for Slough to the answer of 11 November 2024 to Question 12804.
Asked by: Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Labour - Slough)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, pursuant to the Answer of 22 November 2024 to Question 14130, whether the local authorities to take part in the kinship allowance trial have been selected.
Answered by Janet Daby - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Education)
The government has recently announced a £40 million package to trial a new Kinship Allowance in up to 10 local authorities to test whether paying an allowance to cover the additional costs of supporting the child can help increase the number of children taken in by family members and friends. Further details on the process for selecting local authorities will be shared shortly.
The programme will begin in 2025 and decisions about future national rollout will be informed by the findings of the evaluation. We will share further detail on the timetable and delivery of the programme in due course.