Written questions by Cane.

What consideration her Department has given to the issuing of nationwide guidance on school uniform policy, to permit the removal of blazers, jumpers and ties when pupils are uncomfortably hot.

Awaiting answer.

Whether she plans to account for the costs of transporting SEND students to school in rural areas when making future funding allocations.

Central government funding for home-to-school travel is provided through the Local Government Finance Settlement administered by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. The Settlement uses relative needs formulae to assess each local authority’s relative need to spend on specific services. From the 2026/27 financial year, we have introduced a new specific relative needs formula for home-to-school travel which estimates each authority’s relative need to spend based on pupil numbers and home-to-school distances. This ensures funding reflects real journeys to school including those for rural local authorities.

With reference to the document entitled School level underlying data 2025, published on 5 June 2025, what assessment she has conducted on the reasons why 625 pupils in Ely and East Cambridgeshire constituency who are eligible for free school meals are not accessing them.

​This government is committed to breaking down barriers to opportunity and tackling child poverty which is why we are introducing a new eligibility threshold for free school meals ensuring all children from households in receipt of Universal Credit will be eligible from September 2026. This will lift 100,000 children across England out of poverty and put £500 back in families’ pockets, supporting parents in decisive action to improve lives of as part of the Child Poverty Strategy published on 5 December. Under the expansion, over half a million additional pupils will become eligible for free school meals. The department has not made a formal assessment of the situation in Ely, however, specific factors such as lack of knowledge, stigma, and language barriers may impact take-up of free school meals. The department wants to make sure as many eligible pupils as possible are claiming their free school meals. Introducing a new eligibility threshold for free school meals so that all children from households in receipt of universal credit will be eligible for free school meals from September 2026 will make it easier for parents to know whether they are entitled to receive free meals. To support take-up, we are also rolling out improvements to the checking system that is available to all local authorities to help verify eligibility for free meals. We welcome local authorities taking action to ensure government support reaches families, subject to them meeting legal and data protection requirements.

Whether her Department has made an assessment of the suitability of the examination system for dyslexic pupils.

Ofqual, as independent regulator of qualifications, is responsible for ensuring the exams system is fair and accessible for all students. Under the Equality Act 2010, awarding organisations are required to make reasonable adjustments where a disabled person would be at a substantial disadvantage in undertaking exams and assessments. A range of access arrangements are also available for all national curriculum tests, and guidance is provided by the Standards and Testing Agency. In line with the recommendations made by the independent Curriculum and Assessment Review, we will work with Ofqual and awarding organisations to ensure that accessibility implications are fully considered for all young people throughout the qualification development process, including for those with special educational needs and disabilities, such as dyslexia.

What information her Department holds on the number of children that have required access to free school meals in each of the last five years in Ely and East Cambridgeshire constituency.

The department publishes data on free school meals (FSM) in its annual ‘Schools, pupils and their characteristics’ publication, available here: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/school-pupils-and-their-characteristics/2024-25. The most recent data was published on 5 June, and the next publication is planned for summer 2026.To access FSM data for the Ely and East Cambridgeshire constituency for the 2024/25 academic year, refer to the file titled 'School level underlying data 2025 (CSV, 22 MB)', located in the 'Additional supporting files' section.To access data from previous academic years, visit the 'Releases in this series' section on the publication website. Then, locate the 'School level underlying data' file under 'Additional supporting files'.

If she will make it her Department's policy to create a single childcare register to replace the current registration processes.

It is the department’s ambition that all families have access to high quality, affordable and flexible early education and care, giving every child the best start in life and delivering on our Plan for Change.There are currently two registers, the early years register and the general childcare register. We are in regular dialogue with Ofsted about the registers and, as with all our systems, we continue to monitor their operational effectiveness. There are no current plans to alter the structure of the registers.

If she will commission data on the number of school-age pupils with dyslexia.

The department is committed to improving support for all children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND), including those with dyslexia. The SEND code of practice makes it clear that meeting the needs of a child with SEN does not require a diagnostic label. Instead, we expect teachers to monitor the progress of all pupils and put support in place where needed.Currently, the department commissions data on the number of school-age pupils whose primary SEN is Specific Learning Disabilities, which includes dyslexia.There are several assessments in place which measure progress and help teachers identify where pupils may require additional support with literacy. These include the Phonics Screening Check and end of KS1 non-statutory and KS2 statutory assessments.The department will introduce a mandatory reading test for all pupils in Year 8 so we can ensure children who are struggling do not fall through the cracks, or that those doing well at the end of primary maintain their standard.

What steps her Department is taking to support specialist schools in improving the transition for neurodivergent pupils into the workplace.

Supporting neurodivergent pupils into the workplace is important for all schools, including specialist schools.As set out in the SEND Code of Practice, all children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) should be prepared for adulthood (PfA). This means being prepared in the following four areas:Higher education and/or employment.Independent living.Participating in society.Health.For those with an education, health and care (EHC) plan, the annual review of the plan from year 9 onwards must include a focus on PfA.The Gatsby Benchmarks are a framework for delivering high quality careers guidance in schools and colleges. For SEND learners, the benchmarks apply equally, but with adaptations to meet individual needs. Where a learner has an active EHC plan, careers guidance is provided up to age 25.The department has supported the Department for Work and Pensions in developing the use of Adjustment Planners for higher education (HE) students. An Adjustments Planner provides a useful tool to support learners to progress in HE, take up work during term time or move into employment by enabling them to plan for the future. The department is considering how the use of the planner can be widened for more learners.

What steps she is taking to help support businesses to invest in skills and training.

The department’s Industrial Strategy sets out the interventions we will make to help tackle barriers to employer engagement with the skills system. This includes introducing shorter duration and foundation apprenticeships in priority sectors, the introduction of short courses in England, funded through the Growth and Skills Levy from April 2026, and skills packages targeted at skills needed in multiple Industrial Strategy sectors, such as digital, engineering, and the defence sector, in addition to the £625 million construction skills package to train up to 60,000 skilled construction workers across this Parliament.This investment will be underpinned by deeper employer partnerships, including launching Technical Excellence Colleges to develop pipelines of skilled workers for local businesses.The Chair of Skills England, in partnership with the Industrial Strategy Advisory Council, will explore how employers, individuals and local and central government work together to address national skills needs, to support jobs of the future in the growth-driving sectors, and in particular opportunities for further business engagement and investment into the skills pipeline.

What steps her Department is taking to support routes into vocational education pathways for people over the age of 22.

The government supports learners through technical education, including apprenticeships and Skills Bootcamps. We are transforming the apprenticeships offer into a new growth and skills offer, which will provide greater flexibility to employers and learners and support the industrial strategy.From August, the department is reducing the apprenticeship minimum duration to eight months. This will enable learners to achieve occupational competence more quickly.We have confirmed £136 million for Skills Bootcamps across a range of priority sectors in 2025/26 to fund training for over 40,000 learners.In the 2025/26 academic year, the government will invest around £1.4 billion in the Adult Skills Fund (ASF), including the Free Courses for Jobs Offer. This provides eligible adults with access to high value level 3 qualifications to improve job prospects and earnings.Currently 62% of the ASF is devolved to nine Mayoral Strategic Authorities and the Greater London Authority who can decide how to make best use of the ASF to meet their local needs.From September 2026, learners can apply for funding from the Lifelong Learning Entitlement (LLE), a new student finance system for courses and modules starting from January 2027. The LLE will help adults upskill or retrain, at a time that is right for them, such as those returning from career breaks.

What steps her Department is taking to support the mental health and well-being of school students.

This government is committed to improving mental health support for all children and young people. This is critical to high and rising standards in schools and breaking down barriers to opportunity, helping pupils to achieve and thrive in education.That is why the government will provide access to specialist mental health professionals in every school, so every child and young person has access to early support to address problems before they escalate. Mental Health Support Teams continue to roll out in schools and colleges across the country and are expected to cover at least 50% of pupils this year.The government will also recruit an additional 8,500 new mental health staff to treat children and adults, and open new Young Futures hubs with access to mental health support workers.To support education staff, the department provides a range of guidance and practical resources on promoting and supporting pupils’ mental health and wellbeing, such as a resources hub for mental health leads and a toolkit to help schools choose evidence-based early support for pupils.

What assessment she has made of the adequacy of levels of breakfast club funding.

Over 750 early adopter schools are now delivering free breakfast clubs across the country as part of a test and learn phase before further rollout of the programme. The department has used existing programmes and costs to determine the funding rates for early adopter schools, which have been tested and refined with a number of schools. An average school with 50% take up on the early adopter scheme would receive around £23,000 for a full year.We will be working closely with the early adopter schools to test how they utilise the funding, which includes food, delivery and staffing costs. The department has a robust strategy in place to capture and analyse this data.

What steps she is taking to improve recruitment in the early years sector.

The early years workforce is at the heart of the government’s mission to give every child the best start in life and deliver the Plan for Change. The department is determined to create change in the approach to early years, focusing on high-quality early education, celebrating early years careers and embedding the sector into the wider education system. Later this year, we will publish a strategy to reform early years education, including the workforce.The government is supporting the sector to attract talented staff and childminders by creating conditions for improved recruitment and new routes into the workforce. Our national recruitment campaign is encouraging the public to ‘Do something BIG’ and start a career working with small children, and a dedicated campaign website is helping people to find out more about gaining qualifications and to search existing job vacancies. We are also piloting whether £1,000 financial incentives will boost recruitment in early years and have been running a childminder start-up grant scheme. Finally, we have introduced new routes into the workforce including Skills Bootcamps, which are free, flexible, employer-led courses that lead to accelerated apprenticeships.Retaining and maximising the staff already in the workforce is also of vital importance. Through the experience-based route, providers will be able to maximise the potential of their staff who have the right skills and experience but do not hold an approved qualification. We have also taken steps to increase the graduate workforce via the early years teacher degree apprenticeship, providing a new undergraduate route to gaining early years teacher status.

What steps she is taking to ensure that Skills England is subject to parliamentary scrutiny.

As an Executive Agency, Skills England will be subject to clear requirements on governance, transparency and accountability as set out by the Cabinet Office and applying across government.A sponsor Minister within the department will be accountable to Parliament on all matters concerning Skills England, including the policy framework within which it operates, ensuring it meets its strategic objectives and, in doing so, delivers value for money.Skills England will be led by a Chief Executive, who will be directly accountable to a relevant departmental sponsor Minister for delivery and day to day activities. They will also be accountable to the sponsor department’s Permanent Secretary for responsible use of public funds, via formal designation as Accounting Officer for the agency.A framework document will be agreed between the department and Skills England, which will be approved by HM Treasury. This will set out the governance and accountability framework within which Skills England and the department will operate and will be publicly available.In line with other Executive Agencies, and as set out in the Public Bodies Handbook, Skills England will regularly publish information on the execution of its functions. This will include an annual report, which sponsor ministers are required to publish to ensure Parliament is kept informed of Skills England’s activities.The IfATE (Transfer of Functions etc) Bill also requires my right hon. Friend, the Secretary of State for Education, to publish and lay before Parliament, within six months after the closure of IfATE, a report setting out which of the functions in this Bill are being exercised by Skills England and the impact of this on apprenticeships and technical education in England.

What steps her Department is taking to support the mental health and well-being of school students.

I refer the hon. Member for Ely and East Cambridgeshire to the answer of 4 March 2025 to Question 33348.

What steps her Department is taking to help tackle persistent absence among young carers.

The department wants to ensure that young carers have the best life chances by supporting them in their education. We recognise that absence from school is almost always a symptom of wider needs and barriers that a family is facing. It is often the best early indication of need in a family that may not be in contact with other services. The department’s expectations of local authorities and schools, as set out in the ‘Working together to improve school attendance’ guidance, were made statutory on 19 August 2024. The ‘support-first’ ethos of the attendance guidance is that pupils and families, including young carers, should receive holistic, whole-family support to help them overcome the barriers to attendance they are facing. This includes holding regular meetings with the families of pupils who the school, and/or local authority, consider to be vulnerable, to discuss attendance and engagement at school. Schools are expected to recognise that absence is a symptom and that improving pupil’s attendance is part of supporting the pupil’s overall welfare. Young carers are also now part of the school census, which will improve their visibility in the school system and allow schools to better identify and support their young carers. This will provide an annual data collection to establish long term trends. Separately, the department also publishes daily attendance data on a fortnightly basis and will continue to monitor the quality of data on young carers that is collected via the school register for consideration to include in the daily data collection in the future. Schools can also use pupil premium funding to support other pupils with identified needs, including young carers. Pupil premium funding has increased to over £2.9 billion for the 2024/25 financial year.

What steps she is taking to ensure the availability of high-quality childcare.

It is the department’s ambition that parents have access to high-quality, affordable and flexible early education and childcare.Next year alone, we plan to provide over £8 billion for the early years entitlements, which is a more than 30% increase compared to 2024/25, as we roll out the expansion of the entitlements, so eligible working parents of children aged from nine months can access 30 hours of funded childcare.From the start of September 2024, eligible working parents have been entitled to 15 hours a week of early education and care from the term after their child turns nine months. So far, over 320,000 additional parents are now accessing a place. Going further, from September 2025, eligible working parents will be able to access 30 hours of early education and childcare a week, over 38 weeks of the year, from the term after their child turns nine months until they start school.In September 2024, my right hon. Friend, the Secretary of State for Education announced that state-funded primary phase schools could apply for up to £150,000 of £15 million capital funding to create or expand on-site nurseries. Schools could apply between 17 October and 19 December 2024 and will be notified of the outcome in this year. This new funding will complement ongoing work to expand provision across the country, including the £100 million capital funding allocated to local authorities in 2023/24 to increase capacity of early years and wraparound provision in local areas.Parents may also be eligible for childcare support through Tax-Free Childcare or Universal Credit Childcare.The department is determined to create change in the approach to early years, focusing on high-quality early education, celebrating and supporting early years careers, and embedding the sector into the wider education system. We are delivering programmes to support the sector to attract talented staff and childminders by creating conditions for improved recruitment, alongside programmes to better utilise the skills of the existing workforce.The department also wants to ensure that parents are aware of and accessing all government-funded childcare support they are eligible for. We are raising awareness of the government-funded childcare support available via the Childcare Choices website to stimulate increased take-up by eligible families, because this could make a significant financial difference to families.

What recent assessment she has made of the trends in the level of teacher recruitment.

High-quality teaching is the biggest in-school factor that makes a difference to a child’s education, so having sufficient expert teachers is critical to the government’s mission to break down barriers to opportunity and boost the life chances for every child. This government has inherited a system with critical shortages of teachers, with numbers not keeping pace with demographic changes.Information on the school workforce, including the number of teachers entering and leaving service in state-funded schools, is published in the ‘School workforce in England’ statistical publication which is available here: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/school-workforce-in-england.Under the previous government, the rates and numbers of entrants to the state-funded teaching profession in England decreased in 2023/24, while the rates and numbers of leavers from to the state-funded teaching profession in England remained stable. While leavers have returned to pre-pandemic levels, entrants have returned to figures similar to the 2021/22 academic year. Each year, the number of teachers entering state-funded schools in England is higher than those leaving.With regards recruitment of trainee teachers, information on the numbers and characteristics of new entrants to initial teacher training (ITT) in England is published in the ‘ITT census’ statistical publication which is available here: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/initial-teacher-training-census.In 2024/25, there were 27,836 new entrants to ITT, a 6% increase compared to the revised figure of 26,376 in 2023/24. This reverses a trend of year-on-year decreases since the pandemic period with a high of 40,377 new entrants in 2020/21. Despite the increase in the latest year, numbers of entrants remain below pre-pandemic levels.Postgraduate ITT targets for 2024/25 were set using analysis from the Teacher Workforce Model which can be viewed here: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/postgraduate-initial-teacher-training-targets.The percentage of the postgraduate ITT target achieved for all subjects (secondary and primary) was 69%. This is an increase of 9 percentage points, up from 60% in 2023/24.The department is committed to recruiting an additional 6,500 new expert teachers across our schools, both mainstream and specialist, and our colleges over the course of this Parliament, which is why this government accepted the School Teachers’ Review Body’s recommendation of a 5.5% pay award for teachers and leaders in maintained schools from last September. To further boost recruitment, we announced an ITT financial incentives package for the 2025/26 recruitment cycle worth £233 million, a £37 million increase on the last cycle. This includes a range of measures, including bursaries worth £29,000 tax-free and scholarships worth £31,000 tax-free, to encourage talented trainees to train in key subjects such as mathematics, physics, chemistry and computing.

Whether she has made an assessment of the potential merits of expanding the eligibility criteria for free school meals.

Under current programmes, 2.1 million disadvantaged pupils are registered to receive benefits-based free school meals (FSM). An additional 1.3 million are eligible for a free meal under universal infant free school meals. The government is committed to delivering an ambitious strategy to reduce child poverty by tackling the root causes and giving every child the best start in life. To support this, a new Ministerial taskforce has been set up to develop a Child Poverty Strategy. The taskforce will consider a range of policies, assessing what will have the greatest impact in driving down rates of child poverty. As with all policies, the government keeps the approach to FSM under review.

If she will make an assessment of the potential implications for his policies of the report by the Royal Society of Chemistry entitled Future workforce and educational pathways, published in January 2025.

The department is aware of the report and we recognise the importance of skills in all sectors, including the chemical sector, which is why the government is developing a comprehensive strategy for post‐16 education and skills, to break down barriers to opportunity, support the development of a skilled workforce in all areas and drive economic growth in all sectors.The department has established Skills England to ensure we have the highly trained workforce needed to deliver the national, regional and local skills needs of the next decade. It will ensure that the skills system is clear and navigable for individuals, for both young people and older adults, strengthening careers pathways into jobs across the economy.The department published a Jobs and Skills Dashboard in May 2024, which allows users to explore employment, demand and education pathways for both science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) occupations and occupations most relevant to the UK critical technologies. This dashboard can be accessed here: https://department-for-education.shinyapps.io/ufs-jobs-and-skills-dashboard/?_inputs_&navbar=%22Jobs%20and%20skills%22&tabsID=%22Summary%22&sectorChoice=%22STEM%22&shortageTimeChoice=%22Air-conditioning%20and%20refrigeration%20engineers%20SOC2010%22.An accompanying ad-hoc statistics release was also made available on Explore Education Statistics in May 2024, which can be accessed here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/supply-of-skills-for-jobs-in-science-and-technology.Skills England will continue to assess the skills needs of the tech sector and the skills provision required to meet these skills needs. It is working closely with the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology and the Industrial Skills Council to bring businesses, training partners and unions together with national and local government, including Mayoral Strategic/Combined Authorities, to develop a clear assessment of the country’s skills needs for the tech sector and map pathways by which they can be filled.