Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps she is taking with Cabinet colleagues to tackle the impact of socio-economic disadvantage on future earnings.

Every child should have every opportunity to succeed, no matter who they are, where they are from, or how much their parents earn. Too often opportunity for children and young people is defined by their background.

That is why this government is committed to breaking the link between a child’s background and their future success. The Opportunity Mission will set every child up for the best start in life, help every child to achieve and thrive at school, build skills for opportunity and growth, and build family security, tackling the underlying barriers to opportunity that hold too many children and young people back. The Plan for Change sets out more details on our priorities for the Opportunity Mission: https://www.gov.uk/missions.

Tackling child poverty is at the heart of breaking down barriers to opportunity and improving the life chances for every child. For too many children, living in poverty robs them of the opportunity to learn and to prosper.

On 23 October 2024 the government published ‘Tackling Child Poverty: Developing Our Strategy’, which sets out how the government will develop the Strategy, which will harness all available levers to deliver a reduction in child poverty this parliament as part of an ambitious ten year strategy. The report is available here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/tackling-child-poverty-developing-our-strategy.

The Strategy will look at levers across four key themes of increasing incomes, reducing essential costs, increasing financial resilience, and better local support, especially in the early years.

This government will also, at last, commence the socio-economic duty in Section 1 of the Equality Act 2010. The duty will require public bodies, when making strategic decisions, to actively consider how their decisions might help to reduce the inequalities associated with socio-economic disadvantage. We will be updating Parliament on this in due course.