Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what recent estimate he has made of the additional costs incurred by schools as a result of the covid-19 outbreak.

Ministers and officials continue to engage regularly with school leaders and their representatives on a wide range of issues around COVID-19, including discussions in relation to costs faced by schools at this time.

Schools have continued to receive their core funding allocations throughout the COVID-19 outbreak. Following last year’s Spending Round, school budgets are rising by £2.6 billion in the 2020-21 financial year, £4.8 billion in 2021-22 and £7.1 billion in 2022-23, compared to 2019-20. This increase in funding will help schools with costs associated with the COVID-19 outbreak.

The Department has announced a new COVID-19 workforce fund for schools and colleges to help them to remain open. It will fund the costs of teacher absences over a threshold in schools and colleges with high staff absences that are also facing significant financial pressures. Guidance on the claims process will be published shortly so schools and colleges have confidence in the costs they can incur and be eligible to reclaim.

Schools have already received payments of £102 million for exceptional costs during the summer months, and there will be a further opportunity later in the year for schools to claim for any costs that fell between March and July in the same approved categories, for which they did not claim during the first window.

To support schools in making up for lost teaching time, there is a £1 billion catch up package for schools, which includes a universal £650 million ‘Catch Up Premium’. Our expectation is that this funding will be spent on the additional activities required to support children and young people to catch up after a period of disruption to their education. Alongside this, the catch up package includes the National Tutoring Programme for disadvantaged 5 to 16 year old pupils. This scheme will provide additional, targeted support for disadvantaged pupils who need the most help to catch up.

The Department has also provided support for schools to deliver remote education. In October 2020, the Department announced a support package to help schools meet the remote education expectations set out in the schools guidance for full opening, including access to the right technology to deliver remote education, as well as curriculum guidance and resources. As part of over £195 million invested to support access to remote education and online social care, over 340,000 laptops and tablets are being made available this term to support disadvantaged children in Years 3 to 11 whose face to face education may be disrupted. Since September 2020, over 100,000 of these have been delivered to schools.