Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, how much and what proportion of school covid-19 catch-up funding has been spent by region to date.

All payments from the £650 million catch up premium were allocated during the 2020/21 academic year. The COVID-19 catch up premium allocation guidance provides data on the funding provided at school and local authority level: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/coronavirus-covid-19-catch-up-premium-provisional-allocations.

The catch up premium conditions of grant, which can be found on the page linked above, permit schools to carry any unspent funding forward to future years. There is no mechanism to confirm what amount has been spent by each school to date at a regional level from the allocations provided. Schools are held to account for their use of catch up premium as per their other forms of funding. The catch up premium guidance states that governors and trustees should scrutinise schools use of the catch-up premium and that Ofsted may discuss plans schools have to use the funding as part of their inspections. This can be found at the following link: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/catch-up-premium-coronavirus-covid-19.