Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what estimate her Department has made of when the attainment gap between disadvantaged pupils and their peers will close.

The Department is committed to closing the disadvantage gap. This Department’s work for the ten years prior to the COVID-19 pandemic showed that progress can be made to narrow the gap, and that its policies and programmes were having an effect. The Department will continue to monitor progress and to deliver programmes designed to help disadvantaged pupils, for example through the Pupil Premium which was introduced in 2011 and is worth over £2.6 billion in the 2022/23 financial year.