Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment his Department has made of the potential merits of providing sanitary products to girls in receipt of free school meals.

Our current Sex and Relationships Education guidance encourages schools to make adequate and sensitive arrangements to help girls cope with menstruation. Schools have discretion over how they use their funding and can make sanitary products available to pupils if they identify this as a barrier to attainment or attendance. We support schools in addressing the needs of disadvantaged pupils through the provision of the Pupil Premium, equivalent to almost £2.5 billion of additional funding this year alone.

We are committed to ensuring that any action to support disadvantaged pupils is based on robust evidence. We have sought to establish whether there has been any rigorous national assessment of the prevalence of period poverty or its impact on attendance, however none appears available. We reached out to school stakeholders in July 2017 through the Association of School and College Leaders forum asking for contributions on the issue and received a very limited response. As promised in the House, we have reviewed our absence statistics and our recently published analysis shows no evidence that period poverty has a significant nation-wide impact on school attendance. We do want to find out more; this is why we intend to place questions on these issues in the department’s 2018 surveys for pupils and senior school leaders.