Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment he has made of how schools are using payments from the Coronavirus catch-up premium.

The Government has announced a catch-up package worth £1 billion, including a ‘Catch-Up Premium’ worth a total of £650 million to support schools to make up for lost teaching time. Our expectation is that this funding will be spent on the additional activities required to support children and young people to catch up after a period of disruption to their education. To help schools make the best use of this funding, the Education Endowment Foundation has published a support guide for schools with evidence based approaches to catch up for all students and a further 'school planning guide: 2020-2021'. These are available at: https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/covid-19-resources/guide-to-supporting-schools-planning/ and: https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/covid-19-resources/national-tutoring-programme/covid-19-support-guide-for-schools/#nav-covid-19-support-guide-for-schools1.

Schools are held accountable for the outcomes they achieve with all their funding and this will be no exception. The Department understands that each school will have different needs as a result of this outbreak and we trust school leaders to make the appropriate decisions for their students to ensure that this money is spent wisely.