Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what recent assessment he has made of the effectiveness of the support that schools provide to girls who are menstruating.

The Pupil and Parent Carer Omnibus Survey between July and August 2018 includes questions on the provision of sanitary products for girls in schools. The results of this survey will be published shortly.

The government has put in place a series of arrangements to support girls in school who are menstruating. For example, the current statutory guidance for Sex and Relationships Education encourages schools to make arrangements to help girls cope with menstruation, including requests for sanitary protection.

We are now making Relationships Education compulsory in all primary schools, Relationships and Sex Education compulsory in all secondary schools and Health Education compulsory in all primary and secondary state-funded schools. We are currently consulting on the draft guidance for these subjects which reiterates that schools should make arrangements to help girls cope with menstruation and sets out that puberty should be covered before onset as part of Health Education.

Schools have discretion over how they use their funding and can make sanitary products available if they identify this as a barrier to attendance.

As a government, we are also providing over £1.6 million through the Tampon Tax Fund for a project distributing sanitary products to vulnerable young women and girls in need in England.

In 2014, the government introduced a new duty on schools to support pupils with medical conditions and has published statutory guidance on this for schools and others to follow. This guidance can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/supporting-pupils-at-school-with-medical-conditions--3.

This guidance does not specify which medical conditions should be supported in schools. Instead, it focuses on the needs of each individual child and how their medical condition impacts on school life. It is clear that pupils at school with medical conditions should be properly supported so that they have full access to education.