Its responsibilities are devolved policies, therefore it does not have responsibility in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, with the Scottish Government, Welsh Government, and Northern Ireland Executive each having their own departments responsible for education in their respective jurisdictions. The expenditure, administration, and policy of the Department of Education are scrutinised by the Education Select Committee.
In June 2012 the Department for Education committed a breach of the UK's Data Protection Act due to a security flaw on its website which made email addresses, passwords and comments of people responding to consultation documents available for download.
The department is led by the secretary of state for education. The permanent secretary from December 2020 is Susan Acland-Hood. DfE is responsible for education, children's services, higher and further education policy, apprenticeships, and wider skills in England, and equalities. The predecessor department employed the equivalent of 2,695 staff as of April 2008 and as at June 2016, DfE had reduced its workforce to the equivalent of 2,301 staff. In 2015–16, the DfE has a budget of £58.2bn, which includes £53.6bn resource spending and £4.6bn of capital investments.
Ministers
The Department for Education's ministers are as follows, with cabinet members in bold:
Overall responsibility for the department; early years; children's social care; teacher recruitment and retention; the school curriculum; school improvement; academies and free schools; further education; apprenticeships and skills; higher education.
School improvement, intervention and inspection (including links with Ofsted); regional improvement for standards and excellence (RISE); special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) and high needs; alternative provision; special schools (including independent special schools (ISS)); initial teacher training and incentives; teacher retention including the early career framework and teacher training entitlement; Teaching Regulation Agency (TRA); school leadership; school governance; teacher pay and pensions; school support staff; core school funding; pupil premium; school productivity; qualifications (including links with Ofqual); national curriculum; access to sport, arts and music in education, working with other departments; admissions and pupil movement; relationships and sex education and health education (RSHE) review
Governance, intervention and accountability of further education colleges; funding for education and training, provision and outcomes for 16- to 19-year-olds; further education financial stability and workforce; access to higher education, participation and lifelong learning entitlement; quality of higher education and the student experience (including the Office for Students); student finance (including the Student Loans Company); technical and vocational qualifications (level 3 and below), including T Levels; higher technical education (levels 4 and 5); careers advice; support for young people aged 16 to 19 not in employment, education or training (NEET); skills strategy and delivery; technical excellence colleges; international education. Jointly with Department for Work and Pensions.
Children’s social care; children in care and children in need; looked-after children; child protection; adoption; kinship care and family justice; fostering and regional care cooperatives; care leavers; children’s social care workforce; unaccompanied asylum-seeking children; single unique identifier for children and use of children’s social care data; child protection, safeguarding and serious incidents; local authority intervention and improvement; family support including the families first programme; tackling antisemitism; prevention of serious violence in schools and post-16 settings; counter extremism in schools and post-16 settings; out-of-school settings; school safeguarding and guidance on keeping children safe in education; creation of new free schools; maintenance and improvement of the education estate; environmental sustainability in the education sectors; deputising for the Secretary of State for Education in emergencies
Early years education including for children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND); childcare and the home learning environment; early years workforce; early communication skills and early intervention; Best Start Family Hubs and parenting; breakfast clubs; school food, including free school meals; holiday activities and food (HAF) programme; school attendance, including register of children who are not in school; reception admissions; changes to existing schools; home-to-school transport; mental health support in schools; behaviour, preventing bullying and exclusions in schools; school uniform; young carers; independent schools; illegal schools; faith schools; intervention in failing schools and school improvement; use of data, digital technology and artificial intelligence (AI) in education; use of research, science and evidence at DfE
The Department for Education released a new National Curriculum for schools in England for September 2014, which included 'Computing'. Following Michael Gove's speech in 2012, the subject of Information Communication Technology (ICT) has been disapplied and replaced by Computing. With the new curriculum, materials have been written by commercial companies, to support non-specialist teachers, for example, '100 Computing Lessons' by Scholastic. The Computing at Schools organisation has created a 'Network of Teaching Excellence'to support schools with the new curriculum.
Post-16 area reviews
In 2015, the department announced a major restructuring of the further education sector, through 37 area reviews of post-16 provision. The
proposals were criticised by NUS Vice President for Further Education Shakira Martin for not sufficiently taking into account the impact on learners; the Sixth Form Colleges' Association similarly criticised the reviews for not directly including providers of post-16 education other than colleges, such as school and academy sixth forms and independent training providers.
Funding and grants
In 2018, The Department for Education confirmed their commitment to forming positive relationships with the voluntary and community sector.
In 2020 the department began funding the National Tutoring Programme which employed private companies to deliver the tuition including at least one which uses children as tutors, paying them £1.57 per hour. Tutors received up to £25 of the between £72 and £84 per hour the government paid the companies.
In late July 2026 hackers from a group named ExfilSquad gained access to DfE records, they were able to access and extract over 600,000 lines of helpdesk data detailing staff and parent contact information. They obtained full names, email addresses, phone numbers and job titles. The hackers posted a sample of the data taken and have further demanding a payment from the DfE to not publish all the data online. This new cyber group appears to have targeted other institutions such as the police via the Police National Legal Database PNLD, alongside universities. The group may be linked to The Com (short for "The Community"), a loose affiliation of cybercriminals responsible for attacks on Marks & Spencers the Co-operative Group and Harrods. The DfE confirmed the incident and stated that they were working with National Cyber Security Centre (United Kingdom) and the National Crime Agency (NCA) on the matter.
↑This article incorporates text published under the British OpenGovernmentLicence: "Our ministers". GOV.UK. Department for Education. Archived from the original on 9 May 2021. Retrieved 27 September 2022.
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