Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, whether his Department has commenced a consultation with young people and families to collect evidence on the effect on them of the covid-19 outbreak.

There has been extensive engagement with a wide range of stakeholders in the development of the Department’s education recovery initiatives. This has included discussions with pupils, parents, teachers, head teachers, education specialists and charities from across the country.

The Department has also been regularly surveying parents and carers of school pupils, and secondary school pupils throughout the COVID-19 outbreak. This has helped to inform our response on a range of issues and is also helping to shape our education recovery. The reports from these surveys will be published in autumn 2021.

Through the Mental Health in Education Action Group, which was first convened in March 2021, the Department has been looking at the effect of the COVID-19 outbreak on children and young people’s mental health and is considering how to expand and improve support for those who need it. The Department plans to set up a series of sessions with children and young people in the autumn to discuss how the Department can support schools and colleges to develop effective and meaningful mental health support offers in collaboration with their pupils and students.

Ofqual has commissioned two external research firms to find out what pupils, teachers, parents, carers and other stakeholders think and feel about assessments in 2021, and about the disruption that pupils have experienced. One is running focus groups, while the other is running online surveys. Both are gathering this information on an ongoing basis, with the first interviews conducted in December 2020 and the last ones scheduled for after the publication of results in August 2021.