Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what recent assessment his Department has made of trends in the gap in attainment between students on free school meals and their peers in (a) Coventry North East constituency, (b) Coventry, (c) the West Midlands and (c) England in each of the last five years.

At a national level, the Department monitors trends in the gap in attainment between disadvantaged pupils, defined as those eligible for free school meals at any point in the last 6 years, looked after children and those adopted from care, and others using the disadvantage gap index. The gap between disadvantaged pupils and others, measured using the disadvantage gap index, has narrowed by 13% at Key Stage 2 and 9% at Key Stage 4 between 2011 and 2019.

The disadvantage gap index is only calculated for England as a whole. The Department also publishes breakdowns by disadvantage status and free school meal status of several attainment measures at Key Stage 2 and Key Stage 4 at national, regional and local authority level. The data for Key Stage 2 is available through the following link: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/statistics-key-stage-2. The data for Key Stage 4 is available here: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/statistics-gcses-key-stage-4. The Department has not made any recent assessment of the trends in this data for Coventry or the West Midlands.

The Department is committed to supporting all disadvantaged pupils in England and has put in place several policy measures to help schools address any barriers to success that these pupils face. Since 2011, we have been providing extra funding, including £2.5 billion this financial year, through the pupil premium to boost the progress and attainment of their disadvantaged pupils.

To ensure schools have the tools to make effective use of this funding, the Department established the Education Endowment Foundation, which carries out research to produce guidance reports for schools, setting out how they can use the additional funding to best improve their disadvantaged pupils’ outcomes.

In addition to the pupil premium, we have announced over £3 billion of funding since June 2020 to support education recovery for children and young people in schools, colleges and nurseries. This will have a significant impact in closing gaps in attainment that have emerged. Recovery programmes have been designed to allow nurseries, schools and colleges the flexibility to support those pupils most in need, including the most disadvantaged. The Department has also expanded its reforms in two areas where the evidence is clear that investment will have a significant impact for disadvantaged children - high quality tutoring and teaching. This includes the Recovery Premium for the next academic year worth over £300 million, which is weighted so that schools with more disadvantaged pupils receive more funding. The £1.5 billion for tutoring will allow the Department to provide up to 100 million tutoring hours for children and young people in England by 2024, expanding high-quality tutoring nationally so that small group tuition is available to every child who needs help catching up.