Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what additional support he plans to provide to schools to ensure that they can adequately plan catch-up programmes for children returning after the lockdown due to the covid-19 outbreak.

On 19 June, the government announced a catch-up package worth £1 billion to directly tackle the impact of lost teaching time.

The package includes a ‘catch-up premium’ worth a total of £650 million to support schools to make up for lost teaching time. Headteachers can decide how best to use their school’s premium allocation to tackle the impact of lost teaching time on their pupils, but are encouraged to spend it on evidence-driven approaches including small group or one-to-one tuition, support over the summer, or additional support for great teaching. To support schools to make best use of this funding, the Education Endowment Foundation have published a COVID-19 Support Guide for Schools with evidence based approaches to catch up for all students, which is available at:
https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/covid-19-resources/covid-19-support-guide-for-schools/#nav-covid-19-support-guide-for-schools1.

Alongside this, we have also announced a new £350 million National Tutoring Programme for disadvantaged children and young people. This will increase access to high-quality tuition, helping to accelerate their academic progress and tackling the attainment gap between them and their peers.

On 20 July, the department published further guidance on the £1 billion catch up package. This guidance outlines that, through the catch-up premium, a 1,000 pupil secondary school will receive £80,000 and a 200 pupil primary school will receive £16,000 to tackle the impact of lost teaching time on pupils as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. It also includes further detail on the £350 million National Tutoring Programme. The guidance is available at:
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/coronavirus-covid-19-catch-up-premium.

Recognising the additional work schools will need to do to help students to catch up, this £1 billion package is on top of the £2.6 billion increase this year in school budgets that was announced last year, as part of a £14 billion three-year funding settlement.

The government’s plan is for all pupils, in all year groups, to return to school full-time from the beginning of the autumn term. On 2 July we published guidance to help schools prepare for this. The guidance is available at:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/actions-for-schools-during-the-coronavirus-outbreak/guidance-for-full-opening-schools.