Question to the Department for Education:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what measures they are considering to ensure that selective schools serve pupils from deprived backgrounds.

Our consultation ‘Schools that work for everyone’ sets our expectation that both existing and new selective schools should do more to extend access to disadvantaged children and to support other local schools to help drive up standards across the system, for example by sponsoring an underperforming school or setting up a non-selective school.

We will consider the responses to the consultation carefully, and will set out our response in the Spring of 2017.