Question to the Department for Education:

To ask Her Majesty's Government what plans they have to provide sanitary products to young women who miss school because of the cost of those products.

Schools have discretion over how they use their funding and they can make sanitary products available if they identify this as a barrier to pupils’ attendance. We support schools in addressing the needs of disadvantaged pupils through the pupil premium which, in this year alone, has been equivalent to more than £2.4 billion of additional funding.

The department published statistics in March 2018 which show that, whilst school absence rates related to illness are slightly higher for girls than for boys, the gap in absence rates between boys and girls is very similar regardless of disadvantage. This suggests that period poverty does not have a significant, nation-wide impact on pupils’ school attendance.

The department has made it a priority to reduce overall pupil absence as it is clear that every extra day of school missed by a pupil can affect their chances of achieving good GCSE results. Overall, yearly absence rates have decreased from 6.5% of possible sessions missed in the period 2006 to 2007 to 4.7% in the period 2016 to 2017.