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Equality: Travellers

Question for Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government

UIN HL13146, tabled on 8 February 2021

To ask Her Majesty's Government what steps they are taking to implement the undertakings they made in their response to the House of Commons' Women and Equalities Committee report Tackling inequalities faced by Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities, published on 5 April 2019.

Answered on

17 February 2021

The Government made a number of commitments across departments in its response to the Committee’s report in July 2019. While the Government’s top priority has been to respond to the unprecedented challenges presented by the Covid-19 pandemic, we are continuing to progress the measures we outlined in our response to the Committee, chief among them our commitment to deliver a cross-government strategy to tackle the inequalities faced by Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities.

In our response to the Committee we committed to tackle inequalities in a number of areas, including education. My department has invested £400,000 into education and training programmes for over 100 Gypsy, Roma and Traveller children and young people, to receive extra tuition to catch up on lost learning during the pandemic, one-to-one support and expert guidance to help them progress in education or find employment.

This is in addition to the Department for Education’s National Tutoring Programme, worth £350 million, which will increase access to high-quality tuition for the most disadvantaged young people over the 2020-21 academic year. The Department of Education also recently made the announcement about additional laptops and tablets to be made available in 2021 for schools and colleges.