Pupils: English Language

(asked on 26th May 2021) - View Source

Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment he has made of the effect of covid-19 school closures on the spoken language (a) development and (b) ability of schoolchildren across all ages.


Answered by
Nick Gibb Portrait
Nick Gibb
This question was answered on 8th June 2021

The Government recognises that extended school and college restrictions have had a substantial impact on children and young people’s education and we are working with schools and colleges to develop a long term plan to support pupils make up for education lost over the course of this Parliament.

In June 2021, the Department announced £1.4 billion of additional funding for education recovery. This is in addition to the £1.7 billion already committed, bringing total investment announced for education recovery over the past year to over £3 billion. The additional funding package provides support for children aged 2 to 19 in schools, colleges and early years settings, and will increase reforms in two areas where the evidence is clear our investment will have a significant impact: high quality tutoring and teaching. This will provide an additional £1 billion for tutoring, which will allow us to provide up to 100 million hours of tuition for 5-19 year olds by 2024, targeting disadvantaged children and key subjects such as maths and English. We are also making available an extra £400 million to help to provide 500,000 teacher training opportunities across the country, alongside professional development for early years practitioners.

The Department launched a £26.3 million English Hubs programme in 2018, dedicated to improving the teaching of reading. The 34 English Hubs in the programme are primary schools which are outstanding at teaching early reading. We have since provided a further £17 million for this school to school improvement programme, which focuses on systematic synthetic phonics, early language, and reading for pleasure. Since its launch, the English Hubs programme has provided appropriate and targeted support to several thousands of schools across England. In the 2020/21 academic year the programme is providing intensive support to over 875 partner schools.

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