The Department for Education has set out the processes it is putting in place to bring about effective cross-department working on the government's opportunities mission.
These include working with other departments to link up data on parental income and outcomes for children, creating multi-disciplinary expert teams to support innovation, and changes to governance arrangments.
The department gave the update in a Treasury minute response to the Public Accounts Committee’s report Improving educational outcomes for disadvantaged children, which warned that DfE was “relying on the ‘opportunities mission’ to bring together its own, and wider government’s, work to support disadvantaged children" but said it "remains unclear how this will work in practice”.
The committee asked the department to set out how it will use the opportunities mission to further join up data and performance information, and embed the cultural changes needed for effective cross–government working.
The government’s mission-driven approach emphasises working across organisational boundaries to deliver common goals. The opportunity mission sets out to “break down barriers to opportunity by reforming the UK’s childcare and education systems, to make sure there is no class ceiling on the ambitions of young people in Britain”.
As part of the mission, the government has set a priority milestone for this parliament of 75% of five-year-olds in England being “ready to learn when they start school” by 2028. In 2023-24, the latest year for which data is available, 67.7% of reception pupils had a good level of development.
In its Treasury minute, DfE said delivering the target would require “effective joined-up working across education, health, local government and beyond”.
The department said the mission is particularly focused on improving outcomes for children and young people “experiencing economic disadvantage with experiences of care; and with special educational needs and disabilities” and that, “as the report highlights, accurate, consistent and robust cross-government data and performance information is critical to this”.
To achieve this, DfE said it is working to “improve and join up” data to understand and track outcomes across the opportunities mission, with cross-government data work “underway in a range of key areas", including with the Department for Work and Pensions, HM Revenue and Customs and the Office for National Statistics to link parental income data and outcomes for children.
DfE said it is also bringing outcome and delivery metrics together in a single source of data to track progress across all mission areas, including for key groups of disadvantaged children and young people. “This will underpin monitoring and assurance on progress, including through Mission Boards,” the department said.
DfE also said key departments are being built into governance for the mission and its individual pillars, and that the Spending Review process is bringing together key departmental contributions to the mission. It added that, at the same time, multi-disciplinary expert teams have been formed to support innovation, including "test-and-learn" approaches “that will help further strengthen cross-government planning and delivery”.