Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps her Department is taking to tackle the under-achievement of persistently disadvantaged pupils.

The department is determined to do more to improve the life chances of our most disadvantaged children and to break the link between background and future success.

The ‘Every Child Achieving and Thriving’ Schools White Paper establishes the departments plan to improve the outcomes of all children. When children born under this government finish secondary school, it is our ambition that all children achieve higher standards and the KS4 disadvantage gap will be halved. This equates to 30,000 more disadvantaged young people passing their English and maths GCSEs than today.

The department’s approach to tackle this disadvantage gap is comprehensive: rebuilding early family support, reforming how disadvantage funding is allocated and boosting its impact to improve educational outcomes for disadvantaged pupils, improving teacher recruitment and retention so every child benefits from high-quality teaching, broadening the curriculum alongside access to high-quality enrichment, and launching two place-based missions, Mission North East and Mission Coastal, to drive improvement in areas where outcomes remain stubbornly low.