Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what recent assessment his Department has made of the level of attainment inequality in primary education across different local education authority areas in England.

The Department publishes attainment in headline measures for state-funded schools in England at the end of Key Stage 2 by local authority and region. The latest figures for the 2018/19 academic year are attached. There is no more recent data to release as primary assessment data was not collected, and tests were not administered in 2020. Further local authority data, including for previous years, is available at this link: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/statistics-key-stage-2[1].

Due to changes in methodology and headline measures, figures are only comparable between the 2009/10 – 2014/15, 2015/16 – 2016/17 and 2017/18 – 2018/19 academic years. Changes made to the tests in 2015/16 and the writing Teacher Assessment Frameworks in 2017/18 mean that measures of local education attainment rates should not be compared directly across these assessment year groups.

[1] For each year, select the ‘revised’ publication and then open the ‘Local authority and regional tables’. For 2015/16 – 2017/18 the headline measures are the percentage of pupils reaching the expected standard and can be found in tables L1, L2 and L3. For 2009/10 – 2014/15 the headline measures are the percentage achieving level 4 or above and can be found in tables 12-16 (2013/14 – 2014/15); tables 12-15 (2012/13); tables 13-15 (2011/12); table 11 (2010/11); table 18 (2009/10 – in the ‘national and local authority tables’).