Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what recent estimate he has made of the number of tutors that (a) will be required and (b) are available in the 2020-21 academic year to help disadvantaged students catch up following the closure of schools as a result of the covid-19 outbreak.

As plans continue for a full return to education from September, we have announced a £1 billion Covid “catch-up” package to directly tackle the impact of lost teaching time.

£650 million will be shared across state primary and secondary schools over the 2020/21 academic year. This one-off grant to support pupils recognises that all young people have lost time in education as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak, regardless of their income or background.

In addition, a National Tutoring Programme, worth £350 million, will increase access to high-quality tuition for the most disadvantaged young people. This will help accelerate their academic progress and prevent the gap between them and their more affluent peers widening.

We are working closely with our delivery partners, including the Education Endowment Foundation, Sutton Trust, Impetus and Nesta, to roll out a programme that ensures we reach the maximum number of disadvantaged students possible while ensuring that tutors all meet a high quality bar.

We will be supporting the highest quality tutoring organisations to increase their recruitment of tutors. Alongside this, we will be supporting a small number of schools in the most disadvantaged areas to directly employ tutors. We will be publishing more detail of the scheme shortly.

This £1 billion package is on top of the £14.4 billion three-year funding settlement announced last year - recognising the additional work schools will need to do to help students to catch up.