Education Settings: Autumn Opening

Baroness Garden of Frognal Excerpts

Wednesday 8th July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Berridge]

The noble Lord is correct. When you have £1 billion, it is important to make sure that it gets to where it needs to go and delivers what it should. That is why £650 million will go directly to schools. Part of that is to enable them to purchase the subsidised tutoring. We trust the school system; giving the majority of the money to the schools is best. Only they know who, of the pupils in front of them, need what. We will publish further details on the £350 million for the national tutoring service. We are looking at making the best use of that money, including remote learning, without forgetting that, in certain schools, there will be a demand for a physical presence. There will be flexibility in that fund. Noble Lords will learn more about the £350 million tutoring fund soon.

[Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)]

My Lords, I pay tribute to the inventive work that our hard-working heads, teachers and support staff have done over the lockdown period to encourage learning and to try to keep pupils in contact with schooling. As the noble Lord, Lord Baker, said, pupils have lost a great deal of learning time, so surely it is only fair that exams are cut back in 2021, as head teachers are calling for. As the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, mentioned, will we also see the cancellation of school league tables, which cause damage at the best of times and would be truly harmful now?

[Baroness Berridge]

My Lords, as I am sure the noble Baroness is aware, there will be no exam data and performance tables for 2020, for precisely that reason. Ofqual is consulting at the moment to see how we can deliver exams next year. One issue is that the effect on children has been disparate. We are getting reports that, for some of the vulnerable children who have been in school, there have been small class sizes since February and some of them are excelling. Some children with English as an additional language have thrived. At the end of the day, we have to trust that schools know how best to deal with their children when they come back. Of those vulnerable children who have been in school, some of them have had an excellent experience.