Catch-up Premium

Nick Gibb Excerpts

Tuesday 15th June 2021 Commons Chamber

[The Minister for School Standards (Nick Gibb)]

Well, here we are again. As I said last week, once again we have heard nothing from Opposition Front Benchers but

“warm words and hot indignation”,

with no serious plan, while

“the Government are getting on with the challenging job of tackling the pandemic, keeping our economy alive, supporting people’s incomes, supporting the NHS and our doctors and nurses, vaccinating the nation, and providing education and support to 8 million children and young people.”—[Official Report, 9 June 2021; Vol. 696, c. 967.]

However, once again I welcome the debate and the opportunity that it provides to set out clearly our commitment and action to ensure that no child will suffer damage to their long-term prospects because of the pandemic.

The motion’s title on the Order Paper is “Allocation of funding for the catch-up premium”. The catch-up premium—£650 million of additional funding for schools—was announced by the Prime Minister in June 2020. It provided £80 per pupil in mainstream schools, both primary and secondary, and three times that rate—£240—for each place in special schools, special units and alternative provision. Even in the early days of the pandemic, the Government knew that closing schools to most pupils would have an impact on children’s education, so alongside the action that we took to secure jobs, support the economy and back the NHS, the catch-up premium ensured that schools could respond to the challenges that children and young people faced.

At the same time, in June last year, we also announced the £350 million national tutoring programme and, with the support of the Education Endowment Foundation, evaluated and procured 33 tutoring organisations to provide one-to-one and small group tuition to disadvantaged and other children who were in need of the kind of support that we know from the evidence is highly effective in helping children to catch up. Establishing the national tutoring programme was a major undertaking and is on track to have helped 250,000 pupils by the end of this academic year. The plans that we announced two weeks ago will extend that to up to 6 million courses of 15 hours of tutoring over the next three years.

I turn to the motion itself, which calls for

“all papers, correspondence and advice”

given to Ministers to be disclosed to the Public Accounts Committee. The Government recognise and respect the fact that this House has rights regarding the publication of any papers, but effective government also relies on some key principles, such as the need for confidential and frank discussions among Ministers, Cabinet Committees and any advisers that the Government appoint to help to improve the quality of policy making.

This is not a partisan issue. It has been the long-standing position of previous Governments, including Labour Governments, that any papers or analyses created for the Cabinet or for Ministers are, rightly, confidential. The motion fundamentally undermines that principle. Tony Blair, in his autobiography “A Journey”, in the section on the Freedom of Information Act, sets out in clear terms that

“governments, like any other organisations, need to be able to debate, discuss and decide issues with a reasonable level of confidentiality. This is not mildly important. It is of the essence. Without the confidentiality, people are inhibited and the consideration of options is limited in a way that isn’t conducive to good decision-making.”

To repeat:

“This is not mildly important. It is of the essence.”

That is why we oppose the motion tabled by the Opposition today. We believe in good government and good decision making.

[Karin Smyth (Bristol South) (Lab)]

I am grateful for the plug for the former Prime Minister, who made “education, education, education” a mantra. I was and remain very proud of the difference it made to kids in Bristol South. I accept the Minister’s point about confidentiality, but will address the key questions in the motion? What do the Government think is not good about Sir Kevan’s recommendations, why do the Government not think they need to be funded, and what would be the impact of that decision? If the Government do not want to disclose the documents, we would be happy if we understood what they think about not taking that action.

[Nick Gibb]

We did take the advice of Sir Kevan Collins, who supported our introduction of more funding for the national tutoring programme and the £400 million to improve the continuing professional development and training of teachers. We set up a review into the time element of the advice that Sir Kevan gave Ministers, which will report later this year in time to inform the spending review.

The House has a number of opportunities to scrutinise the work of the Treasury in oral questions, and the annual supply and appropriation legislation will be debated before the summer recess. There are also regular appearances by Treasury Ministers and officials before the Public Accounts Committee and the Treasury Committee.

Since the Government came into office in 2010, we have been focused on our mission of raising school standards for all pupils. Successive Prime Ministers and Education Secretaries have put in place ambitious plans to make sure that, no matter where you are born or where in the country you live, you will receive a world-class education. That is not a programme for a single term of Government; nor is it an initiative to get headlines. It is generational reform—long, steady, painstaking and difficult. We have much still to achieve, but we are making progress.

Before we came into Government in 2010, the correlation between parental wealth and pupil achievement was stubbornly entrenched. Children from poorer homes, who were already behind in their development when they started school, were falling further behind their peers. Rather than being an engine of social mobility, our school system was calcifying inequality. For Conservatives, for whom education is the gateway to opportunity, this was unacceptable.

We took bold, decisive action that was opposed all the way by the Opposition, but which has led to better schools and better life chances for young people. We overhauled Labour’s national curriculum, which was unnecessarily bureaucratic and too focused on a range of generic skills rather than rich, subject-based content, and replaced it with a new national curriculum, which provides pupils with an introduction to the essential knowledge they need to be educated citizens, immersing them in the best that has been thought and said. We took action to make sure that teachers got better training, and we introduced the pupil premium to give schools the funding they need to support disadvantaged pupils.

Our reforms are turning the tide, rebuffing the fatalistic assumptions of too many who seemed to accept that the gap between rich and poor is inevitable—the soft bigotry of low expectations, which for years was writing off pupil’s lives rather than striving to give them the education needed to influence their own destiny. Academic standards have been rising and the attainment gap between advantaged and disadvantaged pupils has been closing. Thanks to our reforms, more pupils are taking core academic GCSEs, more children are reading fluently and more children are attending good and outstanding schools.

We have taken action throughout this pandemic to ensure that children are supported, but our commitment to provide a good education for every child pre-dates covid-19 reaching our shores. We produced the best schools budget settlement for many years at the 2019 spending review. Totalling £14.4 billion, that is the largest cash boost for schools in a decade.

Core school funding increased by £2.6 billion in 2020-21, and is increasing by £4.8 billion and £7.1 billion in 2021-22 and 2022-23 respectively compared with 2019-20, including significant additional funding for children with special educational needs and disabilities. That unrelenting drive to give children and young people the best start in life meant that we were in a better place to handle the unprecedented challenges that the pandemic posed.

We know that the pandemic, as the hon. Member for Houghton and Sunderland South (Bridget Phillipson) said, has disproportionately affected children, with most missing at least 115 days of school. That is precisely why we took immediate action to provide education remotely, delivering more than 1.3 million laptops or tablets alongside wireless routers and access to free mobile data for disadvantaged families.

[Christian Wakeford (Bury South) (Con)]

Does the Minister agree that the best place for a child has always been in school, and when Opposition Members, and indeed their councils and councillors, were calling for schools not to reopen last year that did a disservice to not only the country but our children, who matter the most, and does he agree that they should apologise for that?

[Nick Gibb]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. There is no substitute for pupils being in the classroom with their teachers and friends.

This month, we published a report from Renaissance Learning and the Education Policy Institute, which presented a sobering reminder of the ongoing scale of the recovery challenge. Clearly, there is much work to do and we do not shy away from it, because the Government will always do whatever it takes to support children. That is why schools were the last to close and the first to open in tackling the spread of covid, because we know that getting children back in the classroom is vital to supporting catch up.

That it is why schools have access to both a catch-up and a recovery premium to enable them to assess what will help their pupils to catch up their missed education and to make provision available to ensure that they do so. It comes on top of our £200 million investment in summer schools, which is creating the opportunity for up to 600,000 pupils to take part in educational and enrichment activities. Over 80% of eligible mainstream schools have already signed up and a £220 million investment in the expansion of the holiday activities and food programme, which will operate across England over the summer and Christmas holidays, will provide eligible children with enriching activities and nutritious food.

Owing to the swift action that we took last June, children are already benefiting from the newly established national tutoring programme, with the £1 billion announcement in June last year, a further £700 million announced in February and, two weeks ago, a further recovery package of £1.4 billion. That brings our total recovery package to more than £3 billion. The next stage of our recovery plan will include a review of time spent in school and 16-to-19 education, and the impact that that could have on helping children and young people to catch up. Schools already have the power to set the length of the school day, but there is a certain amount of disparity in approach across the sector. The findings of the review will be set out later in the year to inform the spending review.

We all know what a superb job our teachers and support staff are doing and have done throughout the crisis, supporting and continuing to educate children and young people despite all the challenges that the pandemic has caused. We owe them our gratitude. Our teachers are the single most significant in-school driver of pupil attainment, which is why we have taken steps to give them more support and access to the very best training and professional development. We are investing £400 million to help to provide 500,000 teacher training and development opportunities across the country, alongside the support for those working in early years.

Some £153 million will provide professional development for early years staff, including through new programmes that focus on key areas such as speech and language development for very young children, and £253 million will expand our new teacher development reforms to give school teachers the opportunity to access world-leading training tailored to whatever point they are at in their careers, from new teachers to leaders of school trusts. That is a significant overhaul of teacher development in this country, giving teachers and school leaders the knowledge and skills that they need to help every child to fulfil their potential.

We are determined to ensure that children and young people catch up on the education they missed as a result of the pandemic. We have announced more than £3 billion to date, and the Prime Minister has been clear that there is going to be more coming down the track. We will do what it takes. While the Opposition are chasing papers, we are getting on with the job of reforming England’s education system, empowering teachers to transform lives through a knowledge-rich and rigorous curriculum in calm, disciplined and supportive schools. We want every child to attend a great school. It is a bold, audacious ambition. We have begun the journey. We have made great progress. We have further to go. We will not give up.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

The limit is four minutes for Alison McGovern and Robert Halfon, and three minutes from then on. May I ask those who are participating remotely please to have a timing device if you cannot see the one on your screens? We cannot extend it beyond the three minutes because a lot of people want to participate in this debate. Everybody else physically here of course has the timers in the Chamber.