Question

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, with reference to the Enrichment Expansion programme area list published on 25 September 2026, if her Department will publish the scores and rankings used to assess (a) Walsall, (b) Birmingham and (c) Sandwell for inclusion in the programme; and for what reasons Walsall was not selected.

DCMS is committed to making a difference in the places that need it the most, through investing to build social and community cohesion and to enhance opportunity where outcomes are poorest.

Evidence points clearly to economic and social outcomes being systematically worse in places where both deprivation and community need is highest; places experiencing ‘double disadvantage’. For this reason, across our programmes that aim to improve social and community outcomes, we will look to implement a tailored focus on targeting these ‘double disadvantage’ places – to ensure that our funding is concentrated in the communities where we can make the biggest difference. DCMS’ approach to place targeting is publicly available.

The Enrichment Expansion Programme (EEP), a DCMS-funded programme delivered in strategic partnership with DfE, will invest £22.5 million across 3 years to support up to 400 secondary schools to provide a youth led, tailored enrichment offer and help them meet the Enrichment Framework benchmarks.

In order to select local authorities to participate in the programme, lower-layer super output areas (LSOAs) were identified as being in the most deprived 20% nationally on both the Income Deprivation Affecting Children Index (IDACI) and the Community Needs Index (CNI). In this instance IDACI serves a similar purpose to the Indices of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) used in the DCMS wide approach but focuses in particular on deprivation impacting young people. LSOAs meeting both criteria were classified as experiencing double disadvantage. The proportion of double-disadvantaged LSOAs within each lower-tier local authority was then calculated, and local authorities were ranked on this basis, with a minimum number of three areas represented across all nine regions.

Additionally, areas were included to align with DfE’s Mission North East and Mission Coastal. The Place Missions will bring expert support into classrooms and new opportunities beyond the school gates for children in the North East, Hastings and Scarborough.

To ensure each school within the programme receives tailored support from the programme, we intend to group schools into clusters of 5-8 according to geographic proximity. Resultantly, we selected 54 clusters across 59 areas to accommodate 400 schools. Walsall did not rank highly enough to be selected as eligible for the programme. It was also not in scope for clustering given the number of eligible schools within neighbouring eligible areas.