The British Government has no plans to recommend a mediator. Our Ambassador to Eritrea has raised the closure of the Roman Catholic, Protestant and Muslim health centres and schools with the Government of Eritrea, most recently with the Minister for Information on 26 September. We remain concerned at restrictions on religious freedoms and at the 41st Human Rights Council (24 June to 12 July), the UK reiterated calls for Eritrea to respect freedom of religion or belief.

Under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005, the responsible person (usually the owner, employer or managing agent) is required to undertake and review regularly a fire risk assessment of the premises and ensure adequate fire protection measures are in place and maintained appropriately in order to mitigate the risk to life from fire. To help responsible persons identify and mitigate fire risk and comply with the provisions of the Order, Government has made available guidance, including a specific guide for education premises, which is available here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/fire-safety-risk-assessment-educational-premises

The Fire and Rescue National Framework for England requires fire and rescue authorities to have a management strategy and risk-based inspection programme in place to ensure compliance with the Fire Safety Order within their respective areas.

Fire and rescue authorities visit premises to audit compliance. They check the fire risk assessment and that the fire precautions in place are adequate and effective in keeping the risk to life as low as reasonably practicable. If the audit shows a premises to be unsatisfactory, fire and rescue authorities can issue an informal notice suggesting safety measures or, in more serious cases, a formal notice.

Public Health England has published two documents for schools on children’s mental and emotional health. These can be viewed at the following links:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/promoting-children-and-young-peoples-emotional-health-and-wellbeing

https://www.annafreud.org/what-we-do/schools-in-mind/resources-for-schools/mental-health-toolkit-for-schools/

This guidance complements ‘Mental Health and Behaviour’ guidance issued by the Department for Education (2018) which is available to view at the following link:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/mental-health-and-behaviour-in-schools--2

Local authorities are under a statutory duty to ensure that there is a school place available for every child. The Department provides basic need funding for every place that is needed, based on local authorities’ own data on pupil forecasts. Local authorities can use this funding to provide places in new schools or through expansions of existing schools, and can work with any school in their local area, including academies and free schools.

Basic need allocations to local authorities to provide new school places from 2011-2021 can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/basic-need-allocations. Data for allocations prior to 2011-12 is not readily available.

The Department has also invested a total of £365 million through the Special Provision Capital Fund from 2018-19 to 2020-21. This funding will help local authorities to create new places and improve facilities for pupils with special educational needs and disabilities.

Special Provision Capital Fund allocations to local authorities can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/send-provision-capital-funding-for-pupils-with-ehc-plans.

In addition, the Department has funded thousands of good new school places and opened schools across the country through the free schools programme. The Department’s total capital costs of establishing free schools are listed below. These annual costs include all aspects of site acquisition, design, and construction expended in that year.

There are also some much smaller additional capital programmes which have also created places, however this is not their primary objective. In total, the Department is on track to create one million places this decade (2010 to 2020), the largest increase in school capacity in at least two generations. This follows a decrease of 100,000 places between 2004 and 2010.

[1] This figure will be available once the Department lays its annual accounts before Parliament in 2020.

The Department for Education has allocated over £13 billion in condition funding from 2011-12 to 2019-20, an average of £1.4 billion a year. On top of that, the £4.4 billion Priority School Building Programme is rebuilding or refurbishing school buildings in the worst condition across England, covering over 500 schools. Data on capital funding allocated prior to 2011-12 is not readily available.

In addition to this, the Department provides Basic Need funding to local authorities for new school places and, as of 1 October 2019, the Department has opened 507 free schools which when full will educate 280,000 pupils.

Published data on annual capital allocations is available at: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/school-capital-funding.

In August, the Department announced a school funding settlement, providing for an increase of over £14 billion for primary and secondary schools, in total, over the next three years. The £14 billion means the Department can ‘level up’ school funding by raising the minimum per pupil funding for secondary schools to £5,000 next year, and the minimum per pupil funding for primary schools to £3,750 in 2020-21 and £4,000 in 2021-22.

Average school funding is increasing by 5% next year – a significant increase - and the Department is allocating the biggest increases for the lowest-funded schools. In addition, every school in England can see an increase in per pupil funding at least in line with inflation, with most schools attracting real terms increases.

This settlement comprises cash increases of £2.6 billion for 2020-21, £4.8 billion for 2021-22 and £7.1 billion for 2022-23 compared with 2019-20. As part of this, the high needs budget will rise by over £700 million in 2020-21 compared to this year, which is equivalent to an increase of over 11%.

In delivering this settlement, this Government is giving all young people the best opportunities to succeed - regardless of where they grow up or go to school.

The department does not hold data on the ethnicity, class and gender of school governors and academy trustees.

The Government is committed to tackling serious violence and we are supporting the police to tackle these crimes. Police funding will increase by £1 billion this year, including council tax and the new £100 million Serious Violence Fund, which will support action in the most affected areas. The Prime Minister and Home Secretary also announced plans to recruit an additional 20,000 officers over the next three years.

Decisions on the deployment of individual officers are an operational matter for Chief Constables. In the Serious Violence Strategy, we recognise the benefits of building positive relationships between schools and police across a range of crime issues.

Inspiring Governance is a service run by the charity, Education and Employers, that supports recruitment in school governance by matching those who wish to be governors to school vacancies. The department requires Education and Employers to meet targets to increase diversity on school governing boards. They are on track to register over 16% of people from Black and Minority Ethnic (BAME) backgrounds this financial year. As at the 2011 census, 15% of the England population identified as being from a BAME background.

‘Everyone on Board’ is a campaign run jointly between Inspiring Governance and the National Governance Association and is not a government programme. The objective of this campaign is to increase the number of BAME and young people involved in governance.

Inspiring Governance report that over 19% of people registering and being placed into governance roles are from a BAME background, and people aged under 35 make up over 37% of registrations and over 46% of appointments.

Inspiring Governance is a service run by the charity, Education and Employers, that supports recruitment in school governance by matching those who wish to be governors to school vacancies. The department requires Education and Employers to meet targets to increase diversity on school governing boards. They are on track to register over 16% of people from Black and Minority Ethnic (BAME) backgrounds this financial year. As at the 2011 census, 15% of the England population identified as being from a BAME background.

‘Everyone on Board’ is a campaign run jointly between Inspiring Governance and the National Governance Association and is not a government programme. The objective of this campaign is to increase the number of BAME and young people involved in governance.

Inspiring Governance report that over 19% of people registering and being placed into governance roles are from a BAME background, and people aged under 35 make up over 37% of registrations and over 46% of appointments.

There are a number of opportunities for pupils to develop entrepreneurial skills. The new Business GCSE, which was first taught from 2017, is intended to enable students to develop as commercially minded and enterprising individuals. In 2014, for the first time, financial literacy was made statutory within the national curriculum as it is now taught as part of the citizenship curriculum for 11 to 16 year olds. Schools are free to cover enterprise and entrepreneurship teaching within their personal, social, health and economic education.

Personal characteristics like resilience, problem-solving and good character are crucial for setting up a business. Good schools will offer a wide range of opportunities for their pupils to develop these characteristics through activities such as debating, sport and volunteering, or through programmes such as the National Citizen Service or the Cadets.

Published in December 2017, the Government’s careers strategy aims to give young people from all backgrounds the opportunity to learn from employers about work and the skills that are valued in the workplace. The strategy introduces a new expectation that every school should offer every young person at least seven encounters with employers, including those who are self-employed, during their education as part of a high-quality careers programme.

The Careers & Enterprise Company’s network of Enterprise Advisers will support the delivery of this ambition. Enterprise Advisers are senior business volunteers who help schools and colleges to work with local businesses. At the end of June 2019, over 2,200 schools and colleges had been matched with an Enterprise Adviser. The Department will give all schools and colleges access to an Enterprise Adviser by the end of 2020.

The Department for Education has made extensive preparations for EU exit. This includes publishing comprehensive advice for schools, liaising with school food suppliers; and working closely with Kent County Council and Kent academy trusts, in recognition of the specific issues that might face schools in that part of the country. This is available at:

www.gov.uk/government/publications/eu-exit-no-deal-preparations-for-schools-in-england/eu-exit-no-deal-preparations-for-schools-in-england.

As part of this, the Department recently wrote to local authorities and academy trusts with additional information and asked them to complete a survey, to help inform our understanding of schools’ readiness.

The Department for Education will be considering the helpful feedback provided by the education sector on preparedness for the UK leaving the EU without a deal. This information will help us to ensure the sector is prepared to leave the EU on 31 October 2019.

Alongside completing this analysis, the Department will consider how best to share the findings from the survey.

Learning about politics is an important part of a broad and balanced education that prepares young people for adult life. All head teachers, however, are required to ensure impartiality and balanced treatment of political issues in schools.

It is for the governing body of a school (or in the case of academies, the academy trust) to decide whether there should be a school uniform, what it will be and how it should be sourced. To support them to do this the department issues best practice guidance which can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/school-uniform.

This makes clear that we expect schools to ensure uniform costs are reasonable. Our guidance clearly states that uniform items should be easily available for parents to purchase and schools should keep compulsory branded items to a minimum. It also states that schools should avoid single-supplier contracts, but where schools do choose to enter into such contracts, they should be subject to a regular competitive tendering process.

No school uniform should be so expensive as to leave pupils or their families feeling unable to apply to a school and this Government has announced its plan to put the current guidance on a statutory footing at the earliest opportunity.

The information requested is not held centrally.

We have invested heavily in improvements to support for children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND), including the announcement last month of more than £700 million in additional funding for high needs in 2020-2021. This is an increase of 11% on the 2019-2020 budget.

As a result of reforms introduced by the Children and Families Act 2014, we have seen the introduction of published local offers for each local area; new Education, Health and Care (EHC) plans for those with more complex needs; new statutory protections for 16-25 year olds in further education; and the setting up of Ofsted and Care Quality Commission SEND inspections to hold local areas to account and drive up standards.

Our SEND review, which was announced 6 September, will consider the quality of SEND provision 5 years on from the launch of Children and Families Act. This includes the extent to which schools, colleges and local authorities are providing the best possible support for children and young people with SEND, with or without an EHC plan.

The information requested is not held centrally.

We have invested heavily in improvements to support for children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND), including the announcement last month of more than £700 million in additional funding for high needs in 2020-2021. This is an increase of 11% on the 2019-2020 budget.

As a result of reforms introduced by the Children and Families Act 2014, we have seen the introduction of published local offers for each local area; new Education, Health and Care (EHC) plans for those with more complex needs; new statutory protections for 16-25 year olds in further education; and the setting up of Ofsted and Care Quality Commission SEND inspections to hold local areas to account and drive up standards.

Our SEND review, which was announced 6 September, will consider the quality of SEND provision 5 years on from the launch of Children and Families Act. This includes the extent to which schools, colleges and local authorities are providing the best possible support for children and young people with SEND, with or without an EHC plan.

I refer the hon. Member to the answer my hon. Friend, the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State, the member for Saffron Walden (Mrs Kemi Badonoch) gave on 5 September 2019 to Question 281573.

The Government is monitoring businesses and sectors across the country to help ensure they are fully prepared for when the UK exits the EU. The Department is considering how best to support them in the event of a no deal. The Department has been clear that should there be no deal, we would support the economy through whatever appropriate action is needed.