Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what plans he has to support children who have regressed with their reading levels during the covid-19 lockdown.

The Government is committed to continuing to raise literacy standards. We want to make sure that all children, including those from disadvantaged backgrounds, can read fluently and with understanding.

A catch up package worth £1 billion has been made available, including a ‘Catch Up Premium’ worth a total of £650 million to support schools to make up for lost teaching time. Our expectation is that this funding will be spent on the additional activities required to support children and young people to catch up after a period of disruption to their education. This includes the new National Tutoring Programme (NTP), which will provide targeted tutoring support for the children and young people who have been hardest hit from disruption to their education. Up to £9 million of NTP funding will make the Nuffield Early Language Intervention (NELI) available at no cost to schools that would particularly benefit. A recent Education Endowment Foundation trial of NELI found that children made on average three months of additional progress compared to children in the comparison group.

Alongside this, the £26.3 million English Hubs Programme already supports nearly 3,000 schools across England to improve their teaching of reading through systematic synthetic phonics, early language development, and reading for pleasure. English Hubs are helping schools prioritise phonics and reading as a key part of their recovery plan to get children back up to expected standards as quickly as possible.

Recognising the importance of reading during the disruption to education this year, we published ten top tips for parents to support children to read and collaborated on a Reading Together Day to celebrate the benefits of reading. We continue to encourage schools to promote reading as one of their main priorities. The ten top tips can be found at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/10-top-tips-to-encourage-children-to-read/10-top-tips-to-encourage-children-to-read.