Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment he has made of the implications for the number of pupils eligible for (a) free school meals and (b) the pupil premium of the Office for Budget Responsibility’s projection for unemployment over the next 12 months.

We are monitoring eligibility for free school meals and the pupil premium as part of the normal policy-making process. We will collect definitive information on the number of pupils eligible for free school meals at the October school census.

Allocations for pupil premium for 2020-21 were published in June, and the first quarterly instalments were paid out in June and July. The total value of pupil premium allocations in 2020-21 is estimated at £2.4 billion. Announcements on pupil premium funding for 2021-22 will follow later in the year, in line with the usual timetable.

In light of the COVID-19 outbreak, the government has also announced a further £1 billion of funding to support children and young people. This includes a one-off universal £650 million catch-up premium for the 2020-21 academic year to ensure that schools have the support that they need to help all pupils make up for lost teaching time, available for all state-funded mainstream and special schools.

We will also spend up to £350 million on the National Tutoring Programme to provide targeted support for children and young people who been hardest hit from disruption to their education. Through the Tuition Partners strand, schools in all regions will be eligible to access heavily subsidised tuition from an approved list of tuition partners. Through our Academic Mentors strand, our most disadvantaged schools can apply for support to employ in-house Academic Mentor to provide small group and 1:1 tuition to their pupils.