Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps he has taken in the last six months to ensure statistical information scheduled to be released by the Department is published on the Department's website in a timely and effective way.

The department is committed to the transparent release of statistics, publishing in line with the Code of Practice for Statistics. Public releases by the department are made in line with its scheduled release calendar and publication dates are pre-announced via the GOV.UK portal for transparency.

Decisions on timing are made by our Chief Statistician who works closely with statistics producers, relevant parties, and the Office for Statistics Regulation to ensure the availability of our data in the public interest. The accurate publication of statistics requires appropriate preparation and quality assessment, and decisions on timescales must account for the time required for these processes to take place reliably.

To support the timely publication of statistics, the department has an ongoing programme of work to improve the efficiency of our statistics publication processes, whilst simultaneously working to enhance reliability and accessibility.

As part of this programme of work, the department have built (and continue to develop in an agile way) the ‘Explore Education Statistics’ platform. The department have worked closely with users to provide a system that meets accessibility and usability requirements as effectively as possible, whilst helping our statistics producers create publications in a more efficient and timely way. This platform can be found here: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/.