Asked by: Helen Hayes (Labour - Dulwich and West Norwood)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, if he will publish his Department's long term plans for embedding digital learning in his Department's covid-19 education recovery programme.
Answered by Nick Gibb
The Department is building on its significant investment in devices, platforms, training and digital services to develop a sustainable strategy for digital technology in education.
The Department has made £4.84 million available for Oak National Academy, to provide video lessons and resources in a broad range of subjects for Reception up to Year 11. To support education recovery, Oak National Academy is developing free, high quality resources that will be available online throughout the summer holidays.
The Department has also continued to fund the Demonstrator Schools and Colleges programme, a peer to peer support network which will aim to bridge the gap between crisis response and long term implementation of technology, focusing on upskilling the profession to realise the wider benefits of technology. This includes demonstrating the ways in which technology can bolster pupil progress and outcomes, and support catch up and recovery activities. For example, through online and in-person teaching and tutoring, and supporting high-quality assessment and feedback.
Asked by: Barry Sheerman (Labour (Co-op) - Huddersfield)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps he is taking to ensure that (a) schools, (b) colleges and (c) universities have sufficient resources to provide effective mental healthcare to students.
Answered by Vicky Ford
Children and young people’s mental health and wellbeing is a priority for this government. While education settings cannot provide specialist clinical care, the support schools and colleges are providing to their pupils following the return to face-to-face education should include time devoted to supporting mental health and wellbeing, which will play a fundamental part in supporting recovery. We want schools to have the freedom to decide what wider pastoral and extra-curricular activity to put in place, based on the needs of their pupils and drawing on evidence of effective practice.
We are supporting recovery action with significant additional funding. In June 2021, we 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 package provides support to children aged 2 to 19 in schools, 16-19 providers and early years. It will expand our reforms in two areas where the evidence is clear our investment will have significant impact: high quality tutoring targeted at those that need it most and high quality training for teachers. The one-off Recovery Premium for state-funded schools will help schools to provide their disadvantaged pupils with a boost to the support, both academic and pastoral, that has been proved most effective in helping them recover from the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak. This is in addition to the £650 million catch-up premium shared across state-funded schools over the 2020/21 academic year, which is also supporting education settings to put the right catch-up and pastoral support in place. The Education Endowment Foundation have published a COVID-19 support guide to support schools, which includes further information about interventions to support pupils’ mental health and wellbeing.
Our Mental Health in Education Action Group has been looking further at what more can to be done to help education settings support mental wellbeing as part of recovery. The department has recently brought together all its sources of advice or schools and colleges into a single site, which includes signposting to external sources of mental health and wellbeing support for teachers, school staff and school leaders, as well as guidance to support relationships, sex and health education curriculum planning, covering of the key issues children and young people have been concerned about throughout the COVID-19 outbreak: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/mental-health-and-wellbeing-support-in-schools-and-colleges#mental-health-and-wellbeing-resources and https://www.gov.uk/guidance/teaching-about-mental-wellbeing.
On 10 May, as part of Mental Health Awareness Week, we announced more than £17 million of mental health funding to improve mental health and wellbeing support in schools and colleges. This includes £9.5 million for up to 7,800 schools to train a senior mental health lead in the next academic year, and £7 million in additional funding for local authorities to deliver the Wellbeing for Education Recovery programme. This builds on Wellbeing for Education Return in the 2020/21 academic year, which offered schools in every local authority and reached up to 15,000 schools with free expert training, support and resources for staff dealing with children and young people experiencing additional pressures from the last year, including trauma, anxiety, or grief.
For further education, the College Collaboration Fund (CCF), a £5.4 million national programme of competitive grant funding delivered in the 2020/21 financial year, is helping to support learner and staff mental health and wellbeing through online programmes and remote support. One of the funded projects was Weston College’s ‘Let’s Chat’ programme, which delivered a number of wellbeing support packages accessible at any time to keep staff, students and their families safe and well during lockdown. We are now assessing bids for the CCF 2 for the 2021/22 financial year.
With regards to higher education (HE), student mental health and suicide prevention are key priorities for this government. We continue to work closely with the HE sector to promote good practice. We recognise that many students are facing additional mental health challenges due to the disruption and uncertainty caused by the COVID-19 outbreak. My hon. Friend, the Minister of State for Universities, has engaged with universities on this issue, and has written to Vice Chancellors on numerous occasions during the past year outlining that student welfare should remain a priority. She has also convened a working group of representatives from the HE and health sectors to specifically address the current and pressing issues that students are facing during the COVID-19 outbreak.
Universities are not only experts in their student population, but also best placed to identify the needs of their student body. The Department for Health and Social Care has overall policy responsibility for young people’s mental health. We continue to work closely with them to take steps to develop mental health and wellbeing support.
We have also increased funding to specialist services. In March, we announced a £79 million boost to children and young people’s mental health support, which will include increasing the number of Mental Health Support Teams. The support teams - which provide early intervention on mental health and emotional wellbeing issues in schools and colleges - will grow from the 59 set up by last March to around 400 by April 2023, supporting nearly 3 million children. This increase means that millions of children and young people will have access to significantly expanded mental health services. In total, £13 million will be used to accelerate progress to support young adults aged 18 to 25. This group includes university students and those not in education or training, who have reported the worst mental health outcomes during the COVID-19 outbreak, and who sometimes fall through the gap between children and adult services.
While it is for HE providers to determine what welfare and counselling services they need to provide to their students to offer that support, the government is proactive in promoting good practice in this area. We continue to work closely with Universities UK on embedding the Stepchange programme within the sector. Stepchange calls on HE leaders to adopt mental health as a strategic priority and to take a whole-institution approach, embedding it across all policies, cultures, curricula, and practice. The Stepchange programme relaunched in March 2020 as the Mentally Healthy Universities programme. Further information on the programme is available here: https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/stepchange.
The University Mental Health Charter, announced in June 2018, is backed by the government and led by the HE sector. The charter, developed in collaboration with students, staff and partner organisations, aims to drive up standards of practice, including leadership, early intervention, and data collection. Further information on the charter is available here: https://www.studentminds.org.uk/charter.html.
The department has also worked with the Office for Students (OfS) to provide Student Space, a dedicated mental health and wellbeing platform for students. Student Space has been funded by up to £3 million from the OfS in the 2020/21 academic year. We have asked the OfS to allocate £15 million towards student mental health in 2021/22 through proposed reforms to Strategic Priorities grant funding, to help address the challenges to student mental health posed by the transition to university, given the increasing demand for mental health services. This will target students in greatest need of such services, including vulnerable and hard to reach groups.
Asked by: Marsha De Cordova (Labour - Battersea)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what fiscal steps he is taking to help disabled children and their families recover from the covid-19 outbreak.
Answered by Vicky Ford
The COVID-19 outbreak has been extremely challenging for many families of children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND). Supporting them is a priority for this government, and their wellbeing remains central to our response to COVID-19.
We have consistently prioritised children who attend specialist settings by providing additional uplifts to these settings in the 2020 catch-up premium, the 2021 recovery premium, the National Tutoring Programme, and in funding to deliver summer schools.
Special schools will receive additional funding for tutoring to ensure that these settings can provide one-to-one tutoring for their pupils. Across all settings, funding for school-led tutoring will provide greater flexibility to schools to take on local tutors or use existing staff to deliver tutoring. We anticipate that this will particularly benefit children and young people with SEND, where tutors familiar to these children can support them to realise the benefits of tuition. The Recovery Premium can also be used to support wider non-academic interventions, such as therapies.
Additional funding, announced in June 2021, will ensure that teachers and practitioners in schools and early years settings are able to access high quality training and professional development to support all pupils to succeed. We know that high quality teaching is the best way to support all students, including those with SEND.
We are also providing more than £27.3 million for the Family Fund in the 2021-22 financial year, supporting over 60,000 families on low incomes raising children and young people with disabilites and serious illnesses.
Asked by: Lord McNicol of West Kilbride (Labour - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask Her Majesty's Government, further to the Social Mobility Commission's report The road not taken: the drivers of course selection, published on 30 March, what steps they intend to take to provide targeted support resources to address the challenges faced by disadvantaged pupils.
Answered by Baroness Berridge
Enabling every child, irrespective of their background, to realise their potential at school has been at the centre of this government’s education policy since 2010. We do not design education policy that exclusively targets specific groups of pupils, for example based on their ethnicity or gender. Our policies are aimed at improving the education of all disadvantaged children and young people, especially as we know that their education has been impacted most heavily by the COVID-19 outbreak.
In June 2020, as part of the £1 billion Covid catch up package, we announced £350 million to fund the National Tutoring Programme for disadvantaged students for the academic years 2020/21 and 2021/22. There is extensive evidence that tutoring is one of the most effective ways to accelerate pupil progress, and we want to extend this opportunity to disadvantaged and vulnerable pupils. The programme provides additional, targeted support for those children and young people who have been hardest hit from disruption to their education as a result of school closures. Teachers and school leaders should exercise professional judgement when identifying which pupils would benefit most from this additional support. This investment was announced in tandem with the £650 million Catch-Up Premium, additional funding for all schools to support education recovery in academic year 2020/21.
On 24 February 2021, we announced a £700 million Education Recovery package, building on the £1 billion from last year. As well as a range of measures to support all pupils to recover lost learning, the package includes significant funding aimed at addressing the needs of disadvantaged pupils. This includes a new one-off £302 million Recovery Premium, which includes £22 million to scale up proven approaches, for state funded schools in the 2021/22 academic year. This grant will further support pupils who need it most. Allocations will reflect disadvantage funding eligibility and will have additional weighting applied to specialist settings, recognising the significantly higher per-pupil costs they face.
In addition to this we announced a further recovery package on 2 June 2021, which provides an additional £1.4 billion to support education recovery for children aged 2 to 19 in schools, colleges and early years settings. It focuses on high quality tutoring and great teaching, where the evidence shows that this investment will have the greatest immediate impact on disadvantaged children.
The government has also invested over £400 million to support vulnerable children in England to continue their education at home. To date, over 1.3 million laptops and tablets have been delivered to schools, trusts, local authorities and further education providers.
The ongoing provision of Pupil Premium funding, which is worth £2.5 billion this financial year, aims to close the attainment gap between disadvantaged pupils and their peers. School leaders use this extra funding to tailor their support, based on the needs of their disadvantaged pupils, and invest in proven practice to improve outcomes, such as that showcased in resources published by the Education Endowment Foundation.
Asked by: Lord McNicol of West Kilbride (Labour - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask Her Majesty's Government, further to the Social Mobility Commission's report The road not taken: the drivers of course selection, published on 30 March, what steps they intend to take (1) to focus on educational inequalities up to age 16, and (2) to target specific disadvantaged groups.
Answered by Baroness Berridge
Enabling every child, irrespective of their background, to realise their potential at school has been at the centre of this government’s education policy since 2010. We do not design education policy that exclusively targets specific groups of pupils, for example based on their ethnicity or gender. Our policies are aimed at improving the education of all disadvantaged children and young people, especially as we know that their education has been impacted most heavily by the COVID-19 outbreak.
In June 2020, as part of the £1 billion Covid catch up package, we announced £350 million to fund the National Tutoring Programme for disadvantaged students for the academic years 2020/21 and 2021/22. There is extensive evidence that tutoring is one of the most effective ways to accelerate pupil progress, and we want to extend this opportunity to disadvantaged and vulnerable pupils. The programme provides additional, targeted support for those children and young people who have been hardest hit from disruption to their education as a result of school closures. Teachers and school leaders should exercise professional judgement when identifying which pupils would benefit most from this additional support. This investment was announced in tandem with the £650 million Catch-Up Premium, additional funding for all schools to support education recovery in academic year 2020/21.
On 24 February 2021, we announced a £700 million Education Recovery package, building on the £1 billion from last year. As well as a range of measures to support all pupils to recover lost learning, the package includes significant funding aimed at addressing the needs of disadvantaged pupils. This includes a new one-off £302 million Recovery Premium, which includes £22 million to scale up proven approaches, for state funded schools in the 2021/22 academic year. This grant will further support pupils who need it most. Allocations will reflect disadvantage funding eligibility and will have additional weighting applied to specialist settings, recognising the significantly higher per-pupil costs they face.
In addition to this we announced a further recovery package on 2 June 2021, which provides an additional £1.4 billion to support education recovery for children aged 2 to 19 in schools, colleges and early years settings. It focuses on high quality tutoring and great teaching, where the evidence shows that this investment will have the greatest immediate impact on disadvantaged children.
The government has also invested over £400 million to support vulnerable children in England to continue their education at home. To date, over 1.3 million laptops and tablets have been delivered to schools, trusts, local authorities and further education providers.
The ongoing provision of Pupil Premium funding, which is worth £2.5 billion this financial year, aims to close the attainment gap between disadvantaged pupils and their peers. School leaders use this extra funding to tailor their support, based on the needs of their disadvantaged pupils, and invest in proven practice to improve outcomes, such as that showcased in resources published by the Education Endowment Foundation.
Asked by: Lord Baker of Dorking (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask Her Majesty's Government how much they have spent on personal tutoring for students since March 2020.
Answered by Baroness Berridge
In summer 2020 a £1 billion catch up package was announced to help to tackle the impact of lost teaching time as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak, including a £350 million National Tutoring Programme (NTP) for disadvantaged students.
The NTP programme for 5–16-year-olds has two pillars:
In addition to the 5-16 programme, the government made available up to £96 million to support small group tuition for 16–19-year-olds, which is delivered through the 16-19 tuition fund, and £9 million to support the improvement of early language skills in reception classes this academic year.
Schools can choose from a variety of tuition models through Tuition Partners, including online, face-to-face, small-group and one-to-one tuition, dependent on the needs of pupils. Tuition is available in English, Mathematics, humanities, modern foreign languages, and science for secondary pupils, and literacy, numeracy, and science for primary aged pupils.
Since the launch of the NTP in November 2020, over 232,000 pupils have been enrolled to receive tutoring from over 5,400 schools. Our ambition is to offer tuition to 250,000 pupils. Of those enrolled, over 173,000 have already commenced tutoring.
The department estimates that over 400,000 young people will have been eligible for tuition through the 16-19 tuition fund in academic year 2020/21. The 16-19 tuition fund enables further education colleges and sixth forms, including independent training providers, to arrange one-to-one and small group tuition for disadvantaged students whose education has been disrupted because of the COVID-19 outbreak.
In February 2021, the department announced a £700 million plan to continue to support young people to catch up on lost education, including an £83 million expansion of the NTP for 5–16-year-olds. This brings the total funding for the next academic year to £215 million. We also announced an additional £102 million to extend the 16-19 tuition fund for next academic year.
As part of the education recovery plan announced on 2 June, the department shared plans to invest additional funding to help further expand tuition support. This includes:
Asked by: Lord Baker of Dorking (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask Her Majesty's Government how many disadvantaged students they have funded personal tutoring for since March 2020; and (1) in what subjects, and (2) at what level, such tutoring has been provided.
Answered by Baroness Berridge
In summer 2020 a £1 billion catch up package was announced to help to tackle the impact of lost teaching time as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak, including a £350 million National Tutoring Programme (NTP) for disadvantaged students.
The NTP programme for 5–16-year-olds has two pillars:
In addition to the 5-16 programme, the government made available up to £96 million to support small group tuition for 16–19-year-olds, which is delivered through the 16-19 tuition fund, and £9 million to support the improvement of early language skills in reception classes this academic year.
Schools can choose from a variety of tuition models through Tuition Partners, including online, face-to-face, small-group and one-to-one tuition, dependent on the needs of pupils. Tuition is available in English, Mathematics, humanities, modern foreign languages, and science for secondary pupils, and literacy, numeracy, and science for primary aged pupils.
Since the launch of the NTP in November 2020, over 232,000 pupils have been enrolled to receive tutoring from over 5,400 schools. Our ambition is to offer tuition to 250,000 pupils. Of those enrolled, over 173,000 have already commenced tutoring.
The department estimates that over 400,000 young people will have been eligible for tuition through the 16-19 tuition fund in academic year 2020/21. The 16-19 tuition fund enables further education colleges and sixth forms, including independent training providers, to arrange one-to-one and small group tuition for disadvantaged students whose education has been disrupted because of the COVID-19 outbreak.
In February 2021, the department announced a £700 million plan to continue to support young people to catch up on lost education, including an £83 million expansion of the NTP for 5–16-year-olds. This brings the total funding for the next academic year to £215 million. We also announced an additional £102 million to extend the 16-19 tuition fund for next academic year.
As part of the education recovery plan announced on 2 June, the department shared plans to invest additional funding to help further expand tuition support. This includes:
Asked by: Mike Amesbury (Labour - Weaver Vale)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what plans he has to enable pupils with Down's syndrome who turned 18 during the covid-19 outbreak and were required to shield while schools were open to (a) catch up on and (b) extend their studies for another year if required.
Answered by Gillian Keegan - Secretary of State for Education
On 2 June 2021, we announced the next step in the government’s plans to support children and young people to make up for the impact of lost time in education as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak.
The 16-19 tuition fund will continue to support students with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) and 19-24 year olds with an education, health and care plan (EHCP) through the provision of one to one and small group tuition. Providers may choose to use this funding to support eligible learners with SEND to catch up on vocational and academic skills, and skills and learning that are important for their preparation for adulthood, subject to them meeting the eligibility for the fund. Further details on arrangements for the tuition fund in the 2021/22 academic year will be announced in due course.
In addition, we announced the government will give providers of 16-19 education the option to offer students in year 13 or equivalent the opportunity to repeat up to one more year if they have been particularly severely affected by the COVID-19 outbreak.
For learners with an EHCP, where arrangements can already continue up to age 25 for those young people who need to take longer to complete their education or training, the option to repeat a year should be considered as part of the local authority’s annual review of the EHCP. However, there is no guarantee or expectation that all young people with special educational needs should stay in education until they are 25. This would not be in the best interests of many young people, who will want to complete their education and progress into adult life and work. Further details on the option for year 13 students to repeat learning will be announced in due course.
Asked by: Alexander Stafford (Conservative - Rother Valley)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps are Government is taking to ensure that disabled children are included in, and able to access, covid-19 education recovery plans.
Answered by Vicky Ford
We recognise that extended school and college restrictions have had a substantial impact on children and young people’s education, health and wellbeing, particularly those with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND). We are committed to supporting them and their families.
We have consistently prioritised children who attend specialist settings by providing additional uplifts to these settings in the 2020 Catch-up Premium, the 2021 Recovery Premium and in funding to deliver summer schools this year.
Special and alternative provision schools will receive additional funding to ensure these settings can provide one-to-one tutoring for their pupils. We will also provide greater flexibility to schools to make it easier for them to take on local tutors or use existing staff to supplement those employed through the existing National Tutoring Programme. We anticipate that this will particularly benefit children and young people with SEND, where tutors familiar to these children can support them to realise the benefits of tuition. Children will further benefit from additional funding to ensure that teachers in schools and early years settings are able to access high quality training and professional development. We know that high quality teaching is the best way to support all students, including those with SEND. Young people with SEND will also benefit from the 16-19 tuition fund and the opportunity to repeat year 13 if necessary.
Asked by: Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Labour - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask Her Majesty's Government whether, and if so when, they plan to publish a financial assessment on the impact of basing pupil premium allocations for 2021–22 on the October 2020 school census.
Answered by Baroness Berridge
The January 2021 census will be used to determine pupil premium eligibility for alternative provision and pupil referral units for the financial year 2021/22. Pupil premium eligibility for mainstream and special schools will be based on the October 2020 census. We will confirm pupil premium allocations for the financial year 2021/22 in June 2021.
The department publishes information on pupil premium allocations and the number of pupils eligible annually. The most recent publicly available figures can be found via this link: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/pupil-premium-allocations-and-conditions-of-grant-2020-to-2021.
Analysts in the department are in the process of calculating the 2021/22 financial year pupil premium funding allocations, as well as the impact of using the October census to determine eligibility. We will publish the impact of the change in pupil premium eligibility in due course, close to when the pupil premium allocations for the 2021/22 financial year are published.
Per pupil funding rates will be the same as in the 2020/21 financial year, which is expected to increase pupil premium funding to more than £2.5 billion in 2021/22 as more children have become eligible for free school meals.
In addition to the pupil premium, the government announced an additional £1 billion for national tutoring on 2 June, which will see up to 100 million tutoring hours for children and young people across England: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/huge-expansion-of-tutoring-in-next-step-of-education-recovery.
£218 million of this additional £1 billion will be directed through the government’s National Tutoring Programme. This is on top of the £215 million already planned to be invested in the 2021/22 academic year and will continue to ensure that support reaches disadvantaged pupils, while giving teachers and head teachers the discretion to support the pupils they believe are most in need.
The announcement builds on previous investments worth £1.7 billion into a COVID-19 catch up fund for schools since the outbreak began, to directly tackle the impact of lost teaching time and to help with wellbeing and recovery. This includes £302 million for a Recovery Premium building on the pupil premium, which will be targeted towards schools most in need to support disadvantaged pupils’ attainment.