Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps her Department is taking to help art and design teachers with the potential impact of the covid-19 pandemic on staff workloads.

The Department's focus on reducing workload and promoting the wellbeing of school and college staff builds on the Recruitment and Retention Strategy, launched in January 2019. The Department continues to support schools to act and remove unhelpful practice that creates unnecessary workload through guidance and advice such as the School Workload Reduction Toolkit and the Education Staff Wellbeing Charter, available here: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/school-workload-reduction-toolkit and here: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/education-staff-wellbeing-charter. More information on the Recruitment and Retention Strategy can also be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/teacher-recruitment-and-retention-strategy.

The new curriculum body, Oak National Academy, seeks to provide teachers with a high quality foundation for their lesson planning across the entire school curriculum, giving teachers more time to focus on teaching.

The Department announced in July that it would convene a taskforce made up of union representatives, experts and experienced practitioners to explore ways to go further to support trust and head teachers to minimise workload for teachers and head teachers.