Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, how the £1 billion allocated to schools as part of the Recovery Premium will be spent to help children’s speech and language.

The £300 million Recovery Premium for this academic year is additional funding to help schools deliver evidence-based approaches to support education recovery. In October 2021, as part of our broader Spending Review settlement, we announced an extension to the Recovery Premium, worth £1 billion for the 2022/23 and 2023/24 academic years.

Recovery Premium eligibility builds on that of pupil premium, but school leaders have flexibility to use the funding to support any pupil where a need is identified, including those with speech and language difficulties.

Schools are expected to spend their Recovery Premium, alongside their pupil premium, in line with the Education Endowment Foundation’s recommendation to fund activities that support high quality teaching, provide targeted academic support, and address non-academic barriers to success in school, such as attendance, behaviour, and social and emotional support.

Schools should therefore use their funding to assess and address immediate needs, such as those relating to speech and language difficulties, as well as longer-term strategic improvements, such as boosting the quality of oracy teaching.

We are also investing up to £180 million of recovery support in the early years sector, with new programmes focusing on key areas such as speech and language development for the youngest children. This includes:

• an expansion of the professional development programme, which has a focus on early language and mathematics, as well as personal, social, and emotional development
• a significant expansion in the number of staff in group-based providers, and childminders, with an accredited level 3 Special Educational Needs Coordinator qualification
• programmes to train early years practitioners to support parents with the home learning environment, and improve children’s early language, social and emotional development, and
• the Nuffield Early Language Intervention (NELI) programme, aimed at reception aged children needing extra support with their speech and language development.

The NELI programme includes training for staff on identifying speech and language difficulties, and is proven to help children make around 3 months of additional progress.