Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment he has made of the potential impact on primary school education in Ipswich of the priority education investment area status.

The department was pleased to announce Ipswich as a Priority Education Investment Area (EIA) as part of the recent Schools White Paper, Opportunity for all: strong schools with great teachers for your child.

The White Paper set out the department's vision for a school system that helps every child to fulfil their potential founded on achieving word-class standards of literacy and numeracy and confirmed the headline ambitions. At primary, this is for 90% of children to achieve the expected standards in reading, writing and maths by the end of Key Stage 2, and for performance in the worst performing areas to have improved by over a third – by 2030.

In Priority EIAs, the department will offer intensive investment in addition to the significant support available to all EIAs, so that they can drive improvement further and faster. This has the potential to transform pupils’ outcomes at primary and secondary, by overcoming entrenched barriers to improvement and strengthening the school’s system in these areas. In existing opportunity areas, like Ipswich, the department will refine the focus on their Key Stage 2 and Key Stage 4 headline ambitions and build on the good work that is already underway.

In all 55 EIAs, the department will be taking steps to support underperforming schools to make the necessary improvements, build trust capacity, support improved digital connectivity in the schools that need this most and offer the Levelling Up premium, worth up to £3,000 tax free, to eligible teachers. The department’s additional support to Priority EIAs includes a share of around £40 million of funding to address local needs, such as those acting as a barrier to improvement at primary and priority access to a number of other Department for Education programmes.

My hon Friend, the Minister for the School System, and I will be writing to all MPs with Priority EIAs in their constituencies to update them on our next steps for the programme, following the briefing session we held on 27 April.