Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, how much covid-19 related funding per pupil has been provided to schools in each region since March 2020.

The Department has provided a range of funding and support to schools since March 2020, to help with the challenges of responding to COVID-19. This includes making available:

• Exceptional costs funding. The Covid Exceptional Costs fund was established to reimburse schools for costs such as additional cleaning and lost income. We have paid schools £138 million for all claims within the published scope of the fund across both application windows.
• £1 billion catch-up funding announced in June 2020, including a one-off £650 million catch-up premium and £350 million to support tutoring across the National Tutoring Programme and 16-19 tuition fund (which will go to schools, colleges and other 16 to 19 providers).
• A further £700 million recovery package announced in February 2021, including a new one-off £302 million Recovery Premium for state primary and secondary schools in the 21/22 academic year; £200 million for summer schools; and a further £200 million expansion to tutoring including support for early language development.
• Free school meals support. Schools have been able to use either the national voucher scheme, where costs were met centrally, or claim back additional funding to provide meal parcels or locally arranged vouchers for children who would be eligible for free school meals while children were being taught from home. This funding has been in addition to the free school meals and universal infants free school meals funding that is with schools. As well as this, the free school meals supplementary grant was extended into 2020-21. This grant provides schools with extra funding to meet the costs of providing meals for newly eligible pupils before the lagged funding system catches up. The Department has made available over £760 million to support this.
• Remote education support. The Department has invested over £400 million to support access to technology and online social care services, including delivering 1.3 million laptops.

Some of this has been allocated on a per pupil basis and can be reported on a regional basis.

The £650 million Catch-up Premium has been allocated on the basis of £80 per pupil in mainstream schools, and £240 per pupil in special schools, special educational needs units, pupil referral units and hospital schools. The allocations can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/coronavirus-covid-19-catch-up-premium-provisional-allocations.

Other allocations will be published shortly. This includes the Recovery Premium, and the 16-19 tuition fund (of which £10 million has been allocated to schools with sixth forms and schools for 16 to 19 year olds) which is distributed based on the number of students who have not achieved GCSE grade 4 in English and/or maths.

Other forms of support listed above have been provided on a claims basis for specific costs, delivered through central programmes or on the basis of need.