Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, whether he has had discussions with external stakeholders on the best means to evaluate his Department's Opportunity areas programme in the last two years.

The department has commissioned external contractors to carry out an evaluation of the Opportunity Area (OA) programme. The national process evaluation is being conducted by NatCen, whilst the intervention level evaluations, which focus on five specific OA projects, are being conducted by York Consulting.

Each evaluation has a steering group which helps to guide, and quality assure its design and delivery. Members include academic experts, OA partnership board chairs, delivery leads and education stakeholders.