Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, whether the recently announced £300 million of catch up tutoring will go directly to schools.

On 24 February 2021, the Government announced a new £700 million plan to help young people catch up on lost education due to the COVID-19 outbreak. This package includes funding that will be provided directly to schools as well as funding for national support programmes that will provide additional capacity to support schools.

The funding includes:

• A new one-off £302 million Recovery Premium for state primary and secondary schools, building on the Pupil Premium, to further support pupils who need it most. The average primary school will receive around £6,000 extra, and the average secondary school around £22,000 extra. This will help schools to bolster summer provision for their pupils, for example, laying on additional clubs and activities, or for evidence-based approaches for supporting the most disadvantaged pupils from September 2021.
• £200 million (from the £300 million announced by my right hon. Friend, the Prime Minister in January 2021) will expand our successful tutoring programmes targeted at disadvantaged pupils. This will fund an £83 million expansion of the National Tutoring Programme for primary and secondary schools, which has been shown to boost catch up learning by as much as 3 to 5 months; a £102 million extension of the 16 to 19 Tuition Fund for a further year to support more pupils in English, maths and other vocational and academic subjects; and £18 million funding to support language development in the early years, supporting a critical stage of child development.
• £200 million (including the final £100 million from the Prime Minister’s announcement) will be available to secondary schools to deliver face to face summer schools. Schools will be able to target provision based on pupils’ needs but the Government is suggesting they may want to initially target incoming Year 7 pupils. This is alongside wider support funded through our Holiday Activities and Food Programme across the country.