Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, if his Department will create a standardised home learning framework to help maintain educational standards throughout England during the covid-19 outbreak.

Getting more children back in school is vital for their education and their wellbeing – particularly for the most disadvantaged children. Time out of school leads to lost education now but will also affect children’s ability to learn in future.

We believe the very best place for children to be from the Autumn is back in schools. For the vast majority of children, the benefits of being back in the classroom far outweigh the very low risk from COVID-19 and schools can take action to reduce that risk even further. On Thursday 2 July we published guidance for schools reopening to all pupils. This sets out key principles for curriculum planning so that all pupils – particularly disadvantaged, special educational needs and disability (SEND) and vulnerable pupils – are given the catch-up support needed to make substantial progress by the end of the academic year. This includes a section on remote education and can be found here:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/actions-for-schools-during-the-coronavirus-outbreak/guidance-for-full-opening-schools.

Whilst children are unable to attend school, we are committed to ensuring that all children can continue to learn remotely in a number of ways, and as such are supporting sector-led initiatives such as the Oak National Academy. This new enterprise has been created by 40 teachers from schools across England. It will provide 180 video lessons for free each week, across a broad range of subjects, for every year group from Reception through to year 10. By 28 June, 4.1 million unique users had accessed the Oak National Academy website and 14.7 million lessons had been viewed. Further remote education support can be found here:

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/remote-education-practice-for-schools-during-coronavirus-covid-19.