Asked by: Wes Streeting (Labour - Ilford North)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what plans he has to use his Department’s covid-19 recovery funding to increase participation in music in schools.
Answered by Robin Walker
In addition to the department’s ambitious wider spending review settlement for schools and 16-19 settings; since June 2020 nearly £5 billion in education recovery funding to support children and young people recover from the COVID-19 outbreak has been announced. The department’s recovery programmes allow early years, school and college leaders to support those pupils most in need to help them catch-up. This includes the catch-up premium in the 2020/21 academic year and the recovery premium in the 2021/22 academic year. Using evidenced based interventions, this funding can also be used to tackle non-academic barriers to success in school, such as enrichment activities like arts and sport.
The department has also committed £200 million for secondary schools to deliver face-to-face summer schools in summer 2021, giving secondary pupils access to enrichment activities, such as games, music, drama and sports that they have missed out on over the COVID-19 outbreak. Almost 2,800 secondary schools across England signed up to host a summer school, this will have helped to support physical and mental health and wellbeing.
The government is committed to high-quality education for all pupils, and integral to this are the arts and music. The department provides significant funding for a range of cultural education programmes, including music, which schools can access – over £620 million between 2016 to 2021, additional to core school budgets. We confirmed £80 million funding for this financial year, 2021-22, for music programmes; and we continue to provide just over £4 million for a set of tailored arts programmes. We will continue to invest around £115 million per annum in cultural education over the next three years, though our music, arts and heritage programmes, working closely with the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, Arts Council England and others.
Alongside this, schools have continued to receive their core funding throughout the COVID-19 outbreak. The recent spending review announced that core funding for schools will rise by a further £4.7 billion by 2024-25, compared to previous plans, this builds on the largest school funding increase in a decade at the 2019 spending round.
Collectively, this will support schools to deliver a broad and ambitious curriculum and enrichment activities.
Asked by: Wes Streeting (Labour - Ilford North)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what plans he has to use his Department’s covid-19 recovery funding to increase participation in drama and theatre in schools.
Answered by Robin Walker
In addition to the department’s ambitious wider spending review settlement for schools and 16-19 settings; since June 2020 nearly £5 billion in education recovery funding to support children and young people recover from the COVID-19 outbreak has been announced. The department’s recovery programmes allow early years, school and college leaders to support those pupils most in need to help them catch-up. This includes the catch-up premium in the 2020/21 academic year and the recovery premium in the 2021/22 academic year. Using evidenced based interventions, this funding can also be used to tackle non-academic barriers to success in school, such as enrichment activities like arts and sport.
The department has also committed £200 million for secondary schools to deliver face-to-face summer schools in summer 2021, giving secondary pupils access to enrichment activities, such as games, music, drama and sports that they have missed out on over the COVID-19 outbreak. Almost 2,800 secondary schools across England signed up to host a summer school, this will have helped to support physical and mental health and wellbeing.
The government is committed to high-quality education for all pupils, and integral to this are the arts and music. The department provides significant funding for a range of cultural education programmes, including music, which schools can access – over £620 million between 2016 to 2021, additional to core school budgets. We confirmed £80 million funding for this financial year, 2021-22, for music programmes; and we continue to provide just over £4 million for a set of tailored arts programmes. We will continue to invest around £115 million per annum in cultural education over the next three years, though our music, arts and heritage programmes, working closely with the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, Arts Council England and others.
Alongside this, schools have continued to receive their core funding throughout the COVID-19 outbreak. The recent spending review announced that core funding for schools will rise by a further £4.7 billion by 2024-25, compared to previous plans, this builds on the largest school funding increase in a decade at the 2019 spending round.
Collectively, this will support schools to deliver a broad and ambitious curriculum and enrichment activities.
Asked by: Wes Streeting (Labour - Ilford North)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, if he will publish a copy of the financial assessment that was made ahead of his Department's decision to base pupil premium allocations for the 2021-22 academic year on the October 2020 school census and not the January 2021 school census.
Answered by Nick Gibb
The January 2021 census will be used to determine pupil premium eligibility for alternative provision and pupil referral units for the financial year 2021-22. Pupil premium eligibility for mainstream and special schools will be based on the October 2020 census. Per pupil funding rates will be the same as in 2020-21, which is expected to increase pupil premium funding from £2.4 billion in 2020-21 to more than £2.5 billion in 2021-22 as more children have become eligible for free school meals. In addition to this, the Government announced a further £300 million for a one-off Recovery Premium which will be allocated to schools based on the same methodology as the pupil premium. In this way, schools with more disadvantaged pupils will receive larger amounts.
The Department will confirm pupil premium allocations for the financial year 2021-22 in June 2021. This will provide the public with information on the specific amounts that regions, local authorities, and schools are receiving through the pupil premium for 2021-22.
The Department publishes information on pupil premium allocations and the number of pupils eligible annually. The most recent publicly available figures can be found via this link: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/pupil-premium-allocations-and-conditions-of-grant-2020-to-2021.
Asked by: Wes Streeting (Labour - Ilford North)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, how many schools have arrangements for mass covid-19 testing in place in (a) England and (b) each (i) constituency and (ii) local authority area.
Answered by Nick Gibb
For England, we have published this information here: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/covid-mass-testing-data-in-education.
Please note, secondary school and college schools in scope here include all schools where the highest age in the school/college is at least 12 years old. The primary schools and local authority nurseries in scope include all primary schools/local authority nurseries which were is scope of receiving test kits deliveries[1].
[1] The number of nurseries, schools and colleges in scope are defined by those which were in scope to be registered for ATS testing for secondary schools and colleges and for primary this is schools that were in scope to receive deliveries.
Asked by: Wes Streeting (Labour - Ilford North)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what the total net change was in the number of pupils eligible for free school meals between 1 October 2020 and 21 January 2021.
Answered by Vicky Ford
Information on the change in numbers of pupils eligible for free school meals between October 2020 and January 2021 is not available because statistics are not available yet for January 2021. The information has been collected in the January school census and will be published in June 2021.
Asked by: Wes Streeting (Labour - Ilford North)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, from which departmental budget the funding for the Government’s £700 million Covid-19 catch up package, announced on 22 February 2021 was re-allocated.
Answered by Nick Gibb
I refer the hon. Member for Ilford North to the answer I gave on 5 March 2021 to Question 160739.
Asked by: Wes Streeting (Labour - Ilford North)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, with reference to the fund for exceptional costs associated with covid-19 for the period from March to July 2020, how many applications were (a) awarded and (b) rejected by constituency and local authority; and what the value was of those applications (i) awarded and (ii) rejected by constituency and local authority.
Answered by Nick Gibb
The Department has provided additional funding to schools, on top of existing budgets, to cover unavoidable costs incurred between March and July 2020 due to the COVID-19 outbreak that could not be met from their budgets.
Schools were eligible to claim for funding for: increased premises related costs associated with keeping open over the Easter and summer half term holidays; support for free school meals for eligible children who were not in school, where schools were not using the national voucher scheme; and additional cleaning costs required due to confirmed or suspected COVID-19 cases, over and above the cost of existing cleaning arrangements.
To date, the Department has paid schools £138 million for all claims within the published scope of the fund, across both application windows. In the first application window we offered the opportunity for schools to flag other exceptional costs not included under the agreed categories, which were subject to further assessment. Schools applied for £42 million of additional costs which were not paid. We made it clear that we could not guarantee any claims beyond the published scope of the fund would be paid. It is reasonable for taxpayers to expect that public funding is targeted towards those who most need it. Therefore, the fund was targeted towards the costs we identified as the biggest barrier to schools operating as they needed to between March and July 2020 to support vulnerable children and children of critical workers.
Over 15,500 schools applied for funding through the exceptional costs fund, and to date we have made more than 19,000 payments from the fund. Around 450 schools did not apply for any of the eligible categories of funding and have not received payments.
The Department will publish a full breakdown of allocations from the exceptional costs fund, by school, in due course.