Coronavirus Catch-up Premium

(asked on 30th March 2022) - View Source

Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps his Department plans to take to assess the effectiveness of the £650 million catch-up premium for the 2021-22 academic year; and what conditions need to be met for more funding to be made available in the next academic year.


Answered by
Robin Walker Portrait
Robin Walker
This question was answered on 19th April 2022

The universal catch-up premium worth £650 million was delivered to schools during the 2020/21 academic year. The department followed that up with the recovery premium, which is providing over £300 million worth of funding during the 2021/22 academic year, targeted towards disadvantaged pupils. In October 2021, we announced a further £1 billion of funding that will extend the recovery premium for the next two academic years (2022/23 and 2023/24). Building on the Pupil Premium, this funding will help schools to deliver evidence-based approaches for supporting disadvantaged pupils. Further information on the Pupil Premium is available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/pupil-premium.

Schools must show how they are using their recovery premium effectively by reporting on their use of recovery premium as part of their pupil premium strategy statement, which must be published on a school’s website.

The department commissioned Ipsos MORI, in partnership with Sheffield Hallam University and the Centre for Education and Youth, to carry out research to understand how schools have responded to the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, including their use of the catch up and recovery premiums. In January 2022, we published the findings from the first year of research. The report is available here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/school-recovery-strategies-year-1-findings.

The department commissioned Renaissance Learning, and their subcontractor the Education Policy Institute, to collect data from a sample of schools to provide an assessment of education lost and catch-up needs for pupils in schools in England, and to monitor progress over the course of the 2020-21 academic year and the autumn term 2021.

The final findings from this research, published 28 March, includes data from the first half of the 2021/22 autumn term. Complete findings from the research can be found on gov.uk: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/pupils-progress-in-the-2020-to-2022-academic-years.

The department is committed to continuing its research into academic progress since the pandemic and will soon be going out to tender for the next phase.

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