Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps his Department is taking to help children and young people in (a) Stoke-on-Trent and (b) Staffordshire to catch up on the education they missed during the 2019-20 school year as a result of the covid-19 outbreak.

The Government recognises that children and young people have had their education disrupted as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak. The Government has committed to a £1 billion catch-up package to directly tackle the impact of lost teaching time on children in England.

The catch-up premium, worth £650 million, provides universal funding which is delivered in three payments to schools over the 2020/21 academic year. The Department’s expectation is that this funding will be spent on the additional activities required to support pupils to catch up in 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: https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/covid-19-resources/covid-19-support-guide-for-schools/#nav-covid-19-support-guide-for-schools1. A further school planning guide: 2020 to 2021 is also available: https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/covid-19-resources/guide-to-supporting-schools-planning/.

The attached table shows the amount of catch-up premium funding that has been provisionally allocated to the Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent local authorities for the 2020/21 academic year. These allocations are based on the published rates and school census data from October 2019. The final allocations will be re-calculated once the October 2020 school census data is available.

Alongside this, the catch-up package includes a new £350 million National Tutoring Programme (NTP) for disadvantaged pupils aged 5 – 16. This scheme will provide additional, targeted support for disadvantaged pupils who need the most help to catch up. The programme has two pillars which can be accessed by schools. Firstly, schools will be able to access high quality, subsidised tuition from a selection of approved Tuition Partners. The Partners will offer a variety of tuition approaches, including online and face-to-face, and the cost of tutoring will be subsidised by the Department by 75%. Schools can access Tuition Partner support here: https://nationaltutoring.org.uk/ntp-tuition-partners.

The second pillar of NTP supports schools in the most disadvantaged areas to employ in-house academic mentors who can provide small group and one-to-one tuition to selected pupils. Eligible schools can request academic mentors. The first cohort saw 188 mentors start in schools on 2 November, and a further two cohorts will follow in January and February 2021. If schools in Staffordshire or Stoke-on-Trent would like to register interest for a mentor, they can do so here: https://www.teachfirst.org.uk/hire-academic-mentors.

To minimise the risk of further lost education, the Department has put in place measures to help ensure children have access to high quality remote education if they are unable to attend school in person, due to the COVID-19 outbreak. This will benefit children across the country, including those in Stoke-on-Trent and Staffordshire.

To help schools and further education colleges meet remote education expectations, the Department put in place a support package which can be accessed through the remote education service: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/remote-education-during-coronavirus-covid-19. The support package includes access to the right technology to deliver remote education, peer to peer training and guidance on how to use this effectively in the short and long term, and practical tools, good practice guidance and school-led webinars to support effective delivery of the curriculum.

Additionally, over 340,000 laptops and tablets are being made available this term to support disadvantaged children in Year 3 to 11 whose face-to-face education may be disrupted. This supplements over 220,000 laptops and tablets and over 50,000 4G wireless routers which have already been delivered to schools in England during the summer term.