Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps his Department is taking to support adult education institutions and providers during the covid-19 outbreak.

We continue to support providers through the COVID-19 outbreak, and the testing programme that has been successfully stood up for colleges and secondary schools will continue to be used to support teachers, vulnerable children and children of critical workers and to prepare for wider re-opening.

We will continue to pay grant-funded providers their scheduled monthly profiled payments for 2020/21 academic year. We are currently reviewing the end of year grant funded AEB reconciliation position for 2020 to 2021 in recognition of the difficulties and uncertainties many providers are facing. We will communicate any changes to the published arrangements through our Update publication in the coming weeks.

Where applicable, providers were able to apply to the Education and Skills Funding Agency (ESFA) Post 16 and ESFA provider relief schemes for support.

For colleges in significant financial difficulties, the existing support arrangements remain in place, including short-term emergency funding.

During the COVID-19 outbreak, we have put in place a package of support to help the further education (FE) sector build their capacity to deliver digitally. This includes flexibilities to secure devices and connectivity through the 16-19 bursary funding and through changes to the adult education budget funding rules for the 2020/21 academic year.

In order to support colleges to respond to current challenge, including developing new ways of working, we adapted the College Collaboration Fund. This will see investment in new high-quality digital curriculum content, including funding for 7 projects that will develop hundreds of hours of new digital content for a wide range of vocational subjects, as well as PSHE and English and Maths.

We are also investing in FE practitioner online teaching skills through funding the Education and Training Foundation to support teachers to develop their online teaching skills, and we recently announced 80 new grants of £1,000 to FE providers across England to provide additional training and support for mentors and coaches specialising in assisting teachers with remote education.