Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what plans his Department has to ensure that young people due to sit GCSE exams in summer 2021 will continue to have access to high quality education from their schools when school attendance is interrupted by (a) a local or national outbreak of covid-19 and (b) class or school level isolation is required in response to a school covid-19 outbreak.

The Government has announced a package of support to ensure that schools have the support they need to help all pupils make up for lost teaching time. This includes a universal catch up premium for schools of £650 million and a new £350 million National Tutoring Programme for disadvantaged pupils.?This £1 billion package is on top of the £2.6 billion increase in school budgets for academic year 2020-21 that was announced last year, as part of a £14 billion three-year funding settlement, recognising the additional work schools will need to do to help students to catch up.

Schools have been working extremely hard over the summer to prepare for full reopening, as well as to develop remote education contingency plans. This is testament to their commitment to ensuring any missed education is recovered and that we minimise any disruption to education caused by the COVID-19 outbreak. We have a shared responsibility for working to ensure this generation of young people do not face long-term disadvantage.

To ensure that there is no doubt about the roles and responsibilities within the system for providing remote education, the Government published a Temporary Continuity Direction on 1 October, which makes it clear that schools have a duty to provide remote education for state-funded, school-age children unable to attend school due to COVID-19. This will come into effect from 22 October 2020. The direction poses no additional expectations on the quality of remote education expected of schools beyond those set out in the Department’s guidance.

The Department also announced further remote education support intended to support schools in meeting the remote education expectations set out in the schools guidance for full opening published in July. Further details of the support package can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/remote-education-during-coronavirus-covid-19.

For schools, this support package includes an additional 250,000 laptops and tablets for disadvantaged children and development resources for staff including a good practice guide and school-led webinars. The Department is also investing £1.5 million of additional funding to expand the EdTech Demonstrator programme, which provides peer-to-peer support for schools and colleges. The package is designed to help schools build on and deliver their existing plans in the event that pupils are unable to attend school because of COVID-19, in line with guidance and the law. This adds to existing support including the resources available from Oak National Academy.

The Department is engaging with Ofqual and representatives from schools and colleges in order to consider possible contingency arrangements for next year so that as many students as possible are able to enter exams.