Asked by: Desmond Swayne (Conservative - New Forest West)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, if he will take steps to extend sixth-form education for pupils who have suffered from long covid.
Answered by Alex Burghart - Parliamentary Secretary (Cabinet Office)
Whilst all students in sixth form education have seen disruption and changes in the way they have received their education during the COVID-19 outbreak, we expect all institutions providing education for students aged 16 to 19 to support their student cohort to progress to a suitable destination in education, training or the workplace.
As part of the government’s commitment to long-term education recovery we have made available £102 million to extend the 16 to 19 tuition fund in this academic year. This fund allows students in 16 to 19 education to access one-to-one and small group catch up tuition to help them catch up in subjects that will benefit them the most, including maths, English, and vocational courses. We are extending the fund further by £222 million for an additional two academic years from 2022/23.
The department is also investing £828 million across the Spending Review period to fund an average of 40 additional learning hours for students in 16 to 19 education. This funding will start from the 2022/23 academic year and provide students aged 16 to 19 with further opportunities to catch up on the vital teaching and learning they need to progress.
For students who were in the final year of their 16 to 19 study programme in academic year 2020/21 and whose education was impacted significantly more than their peers by COVID-19, we are funding institutions to enable these students to repeat up to a year of their studies within academic year 2021/22. This repeat year offer supports students whose chances of progression had been limited during academic year 2020/21, for example students whose practical skills development, work experience or assessments had been adversely impacted and with the least time left in their education.
We will continue to assess the need to develop existing or further interventions in response to the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak.
Asked by: Wera Hobhouse (Liberal Democrat - Bath)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, with reference to the Autumn Spending Review 2021, what steps his Department is taking to measure how effective (a) education recovery and (b) other funding streams are in improving the mental and physical wellbeing of disabled children and parent carers.
Answered by Will Quince
As highlighted in the Disabled Children’s Partnership ‘Then There Was Silence’ report earlier this year, children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) and their families have been disproportionately impacted by the COVID-19 outbreak.
Through the autumn Spending Review 2021, schools will receive an additional £4.7 billion in core funding in the 2024/25 financial year, including £1.6 billion for schools and high needs in 2022/23 on top of already planned increases from the 2019 Spending Review. This is equivalent to a total cash increase of £1,500 per pupil between 2019/20 and 2024/25; taking the total core schools budget to £56.8 billion in 2024/25.
This core funding sits alongside a further £1.8 billion dedicated to supporting young people to catch up on missed learning, following on from the existing investment in catch up for early years, schools and colleges, including for tutoring and teacher training opportunities. This includes a one-off £1 billion recovery premium for the next two academic years - 2022/23 and 2023/24 - to support disadvantaged pupils in all state-funded primary and secondary schools.
Outside of the Spending Review, specifically on mental health and wellbeing, the government announced on 5 March 2021 that as part of the £500 million for mental health recovery, £79 million will be used to significantly expand mental health services for children, including disabled children. £31 million will also be used to address particular challenges faced by individuals with a learning disability and autistic people, including £3 million for community respite services. For the 2021/22 academic year, the department is also providing more than £17 million to build on existing mental health support available in schools and colleges. This includes £9.5 million to enable up to a third of schools and colleges to train a senior mental health lead, as part of our commitment to fund training for leads in all schools and colleges by 2025, and £7 million into our Wellbeing for Education Recovery programme, enabling local authorities to continue supporting schools and colleges to meet ongoing mental wellbeing.
The government also announced on 6 September 2021 an additional £5.4 billion for the NHS to support the COVID-19 response over the next six months, bringing the total government support for health services in response to COVID-19 to over £34 billion this year. This includes £2 billion to tackle the elective backlog, reducing waiting times for patients, including disabled children. We are providing over £42 million in 2021/22 to continue funding projects to support children with SEND including £27.3 million to the Family Fund in 2021/22 to support over 60,000 families on low incomes raising children and young people with disabilities or serious illnesses.
Asked by: Alex Cunningham (Labour - Stockton North)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, how his Department plans to monitor and evaluate the sufficiency of the additional £1.8 billion allocated to school catch-up in the Autumn Budget 2021.
Answered by Robin Walker
The department is undertaking a range of monitoring and evaluation activities to assess COVID-19 catch-up activity, including for the additional £1.8 billion allocated in the autumn Budget 2021.
The department has commissioned Renaissance Learning, and their subcontractor, the Education Policy Institute, to collect data from a sample of schools. This will provide a baseline assessment of lost education and catch-up needs for pupils in schools in England, and to monitor progress over the course of the academic year 2020/21 and Autumn term 2021. We are seeking commercial agreements for further academic years which will help the department understand the impact of the additional £1.8 billion.
The department has a contract with Ipsos MORI, in consortium with Sheffield Hallam University and the Centre for Education and Youth to undertake a mixed-methods study design (including surveys of school leaders, interviews, and case studies) to examine how schools are tackling the issue of lost education. Results from the study will be used to understand how the catch-up premium funds have been spent and how best to support schools to tackle lost education.
The department is also undertaking evaluations of specific education recovery programmes to understand their effectiveness.
Asked by: Henry Smith (Conservative - Crawley)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what proportion of the £1.8 billion in education recovery funding, announced at the Spending Review on 27 October 2021, will be used to fund catch-up health and care services for (a) disabled and (b) other young people.
Answered by Will Quince
Health services are accessed through the NHS and not funded by the Department for Education. Local authorities are responsible for providing respite care and short breaks for disabled children, these services are funded through the main local government settlement.
Helping children and young people to catch up on education missed due to the COVID-19 outbreak remains a top priority of this government. Our £1.8 billion investment announced as part of the Spending Review is targeted at those who most need help catching up. It includes over £800 million to provide a universal uplift with an additional 40 hours of education for students aged 16-19 who have the least time left to recover; and an additional £1 billion of catch up funding directly to schools so they can best decide how to support education recovery for the pupils that need it, focused on evidence-based approaches.
The department has consistently prioritised children with SEND in our recovery programmes, for example by providing additional uplifts for those who attend specialist education providers (including SEND units in mainstream schools) in both the catch-up premium in the 2020/21 academic year and the recovery premium for the 2021/22 academic year, and providing additional funding to special and alternative provision schools to provide one to one tutoring for their pupils, with 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. The 16-19 tuition fund continues to support students with SEND as at present through small group tuition.
The department is providing over £42 million in the 2021-22 financial year to continue funding projects to support children with SEND. This investment will ensure that specialist organisations around the country can continue to help strengthen local area performance, support families and provide practical support to schools and colleges. It will strengthen participation of parents and young people in the SEND system, ensuring they have a voice in designing policies and services and have access to high quality information and support.
Alongside recovery funding, the department is investing £2.6 billion between the financial years 2022 and 2025 to deliver new places and improve existing provision for pupils with SEND or who require alternative provision. This funding represents a significant, transformational investment in new high needs provision and will help deliver tens of thousands of new places.
More widely, the department has continued to provide local authorities with their full high needs revenue funding allocations throughout the COVID-19 outbreak, including more than £1.5 billion of high needs funding over financial years 2020-21 and 2021-22, bringing the total high needs funding allocated this year to more than £8 billion. The department announced in summer 2021 that high needs funding will increase by a further £780 million, or 9.6%, in the next financial year, compared to this year. Through the Spending Review the department secured for schools and children and young people with high needs an increase of £4.7 billion by financial year 2024-25, compared to our original 2022-23 plans. This includes £1.6 billion in additional funding for 2022-23 budgets, on top of the year-on-year increase of £2.4 billion already confirmed at the 2019 Spending Review, and which is intended to help the sector respond to the pressures the department knows they are seeing: in overall costs, in national insurance, on high needs, in managing COVID-19 and in supporting children and young people to recover from the COVID-19 outbreak. The department will confirm in due course how this funding will be allocated in 2022-23 for schools and high needs.
Asked by: Peter Kyle (Labour - Hove)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment his Department has made of the adequacy of education recovery funding to tackle cost pressures incurred by schools as a result of the covid-19 outbreak.
Answered by Robin Walker
Helping children and young people to catch up is a key priority which is why, in this Spending Review, the department has announced a further £1.8 billion in dedicated support for education recovery. This takes government investment to just under £5 billion for an ambitious, multi-year approach for education recovery across early years, schools and 16-19.
The department has consistently targeted recovery funding where the evidence tells us it will be most effective, on tutoring and teaching, £650 million has already gone directly to schools via our catch-up premium, with more than £300 million going direct to schools this academic year via the recovery premium. Our recent announcement includes an additional £1 billion recovery premium for schools over the next two academic years (2022/23 and 2023/24).
Direct recovery funding comes on top of wider increases to early years, schools and college funding. Schools will receive an additional £4.7 billion in core funding in the 2024-25 financial year, including £1.6 billion in the 2022-23 financial year on top of already planned increases from the 2019 Spending Review, which is equivalent to a total cash increase of £1,500 per pupil between 2019-20 and 2024-25 financial years.
Additional funding via the Covid Exceptional Costs fund has also been provided to schools, which reimbursed them for costs identified as the biggest barrier to operating as they needed to between March and July 2020, to support vulnerable children and children of critical workers. The department has paid schools £139 million for all claims within the published scope of the fund across both application windows.
Asked by: Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask Her Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of the number of school days missed in England since the start of the school year as a result of COVID-19 absence; and what steps they intend to take to assist pupils who have missed school.
Answered by Baroness Barran - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Education)
The department regularly publishes the number of school days missed due to COVID-19. The most recent publication can be found at: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/attendance-in-education-and-early-years-settings-during-the-coronavirus-covid-19-outbreak. On 14 October, 2.6% (209,000) of all pupils on roll in state-funded schools did not attend school for COVID-19 related reasons.
Among pupils absent for COVID-19 reasons, the main reasons for absence on 14 October were: pupils with a confirmed case of COVID-19 (1.4%), and pupils with a suspected case of COVID-19 (1.0%). Overall, the attendance in state funded schools was 90.0% on 14 October, up from 89.5% on 30 September.
The department has a comprehensive attendance strategy that has been implemented since the beginning of this academic year to ensure that any absence as a result of COVID-19 is minimised. We also recognise that extended school and college restrictions and absences have had a substantial impact on children and young people’s education. The department is committed to helping pupils catch up as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak and has committed to an ambitious, long term recovery plan.
Since June 2020, the department has announced more than £3 billion to support education recovery in schools, colleges, and nurseries. This is already making a difference and helping children to catch up. Over 500,000 children were invited to participate in summer schools, 308,000 children were reached through the National Tutoring Programme in year one, and over three-quarters (77%) of eligible 16-19 colleges in the 2020/21 academic year were allocated funds for delivering tutoring for 16–19-year-olds.
Over the coming three academic years, the department has announced the extension of the 16-19 tuition fund to support the equivalent of around 2 million 15-hour courses to accelerate the progression of lower attaining students, with a total investment of £324 million over the next three years.
The department has also dedicated over £950 million worth of additional funding for catch-up in schools. Through the one-off catch-up premium, schools have already received £650 million worth of funding during the 2020/2021 academic year and the new one-off recovery premium which will provide over £300 million worth of funding during the 2021/2022 academic year. The recovery premium allocations have also now been published: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/coronavirus-covid-19-recovery-premium-funding-allocations. Allocations are weighted so that schools with more disadvantaged pupils receive more funding.
Recovery programmes have been designed to allow nursery, school and college leaders the flexibility to support those pupils most in need, including the most disadvantaged. The department is investing in high quality tutoring and great teaching because evidence is clear this will have a significant impact for disadvantaged children.
Asked by: Navendu Mishra (Labour - Stockport)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what the financial allocation from the National Tutoring Programme to schools in Stockport constituency was in the academic year 2020-21.
Answered by Robin Walker
The department does not hold data broken down by constituency.
In June 2020, £350 million was allocated to the National Tutoring Programme as part of the £1 billion COVID-19 catch-up package. In November 2020, it was confirmed that this would fund the programme for the 2020/21 and 2021/22 academic years.
The department awarded the Education Endowment Foundation funding of up to £80 million to deliver the Tuition Partners pillar of the programme. Teach First were given up to £8.5 million to deliver the Academic Mentors pillar of the programme last academic year (2020/21).
Asked by: Stuart Anderson (Conservative - Wolverhampton South West)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps his Department is taking to support the additional needs of children with special educational needs in the recovery from the covid-19 outbreak.
Answered by Will Quince
Since June 2020, we have announced more than £3 billion to support education recovery in schools which includes support for children with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND), 16-19 providers and in early years settings to help pupils make up education lost as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak. Our recovery programmes have the flexibility to support those pupils most in need, including children with SEND, with additional funding provided for those interventions that the evidence tells us will have a significant impact, high quality tutoring and great teaching.
We have consistently prioritised children who attend specialist settings by providing additional uplifts both in the 2020 Catch-up Premium and in the 2021 Recovery Premium and providing the flexibility to deliver provision based on pupils’ need. Additionally, specialist settings received an uplift to deliver the summer schools programme.
We have also ensured that settings have the flexibility to target this to meet the needs of their pupils and students. In addition, we continue to work hard to ensure children and young people are given access to therapies and equipment so that the right support is in place for all children and families, including addressing the backlog in assessments, we are providing over £42 million in 2021-22 to continue funding projects to support children with SEND. This investment will ensure that specialist organisations around the country can continue to help strengthen local area performance, support families, and provide practical support to schools and colleges. This includes £27.3 million to the Family Fund in 2021-22 to support over 60,000 families on low incomes raising children and young people with disabilities or serious illnesses.
Asked by: Helen Hayes (Labour - Dulwich and West Norwood)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps his Department is taking to include disabled children in the levelling up agenda and help them recover from the covid-19 outbreak.
Answered by Will Quince
We are committed to helping all children, including those with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND), to make up learning lost as a result of COVID-19. Since June 2020, the department has announced more than £3 billion to support education recovery in schools, which includes support for children with SEND, 16-19 providers and early years to help pupils make up education lost as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak.
The department’s recovery programmes have the flexibility to support those pupils most in need, including children with SEND, with additional funding provided for those interventions that the evidence tells us will have a significant impact on high quality tutoring and teaching.
We have consistently prioritised children who attend specialist settings by providing additional uplifts, both in the 2020 catch-up premium and in the 2021 recovery premium and providing the flexibility to deliver provision based on pupils’ need.
Additionally, specialist settings have also received an uplift to deliver the summer schools programme.
The department has also ensured that schools, colleges, and universities have the flexibility to target this to meet the needs of their pupils and students. In addition, we continue to work hard to ensure children and young people are given access to therapies and equipment so that the right support is in place for all children and families, including addressing the backlog in assessments.
The department is providing over £42 million in the 2021-22 financial year to continue funding projects to support children with SEND. This investment will ensure that specialist organisations around the country can continue to help strengthen local area performance, support families, and provide practical support to schools and colleges. This includes £27.3 million to the Family Fund in the 2021-22 financial year to support over 60,000 families on low incomes raising children and young people with disabilities or serious illnesses.
Asked by: Rachael Maskell (Labour (Co-op) - York Central)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, whether he has plans to provide additional funding support to pupil referral units to assist with (a) closing the attainment gap and (b) wellbeing and mental health support.
Answered by Michelle Donelan - Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology
As part of the department’s £3 billion education recovery package, we have provided additional support worth £1.7 billion for all schools, including alternative provision (AP). This can be used to help pupils to catch up on missed education, and for additional support for mental health and wellbeing where needed. AP schools have also benefitted from:
Mental health and wellbeing are a priority for the government. During the COVID-19 outbreak, the department prioritised keeping schools open for vulnerable children and young people. Attending school is vital for children and young people’s wellbeing, as well as their education.
In March, the department announced a £79 million boost to children and young people’s mental health support. We will increase the number of Mental Health Support Teams, which provide early intervention on mental health and emotional wellbeing issues in schools and colleges, from 59 in March this year to around 400 by April 2023. This will mean that nearly 3 million children and young people, including those in AP, will have access to significantly expanded mental health services.
Additionally, AP schools are eligible for an additional £17 million of new funding for schools and local authorities to improve mental health and wellbeing support. This includes funding for local authorities to deliver the Wellbeing for Education Recovery programme to provide 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. It also includes funding for schools to train a senior mental health lead from their staff in the next academic year, which is part of the government’s commitment to offering this training to all state schools and colleges by 2025.