Education Catch-Up Programme Education Committee Madam Deputy
Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton) Robert Halfon will speak for up to
10 minutes, during which no interventions may be taken. At the
conclusion of his statement, I will call Members to put questions
on the subject of the statement, and call Robert Halfon to respond
to them in turn. May I emphasise, as I did last week, that
questions should be directed to the Select Committee Chair and not
to the relevant...Request free trial
Education Catch-Up Programme
Education Committee
Madam Deputy Speaker ( )
will speak for up to 10
minutes, during which no interventions may be taken. At the
conclusion of his statement, I will call Members to put questions
on the subject of the statement, and call to respond to them in turn.
May I emphasise, as I did last week, that questions should be
directed to the Select Committee Chair and not to the relevant
Minister? Interventions should be questions, and should be brief;
they should not be long statements. Front Benchers may take part
in questioning.
I call the Chair of the Education Committee, .
1.42 pm
(Harlow) (Con)
Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, and I thank you and the
Backbench Business Committee for giving me a chance to make a
statement on the Committee’s new report, entitled “Is the
Catch-up Programme fit for purpose?” I also thank the Minister,
my hon. Friend the Member for Worcester (Mr Walker). It seems a
bit like groundhog day, because we have spent the last few weeks
debating this subject, and we did so in the Committee just last
Tuesday. I want to give a special mention to the hon. Member for
Liverpool, Riverside (), who is an incredibly
hard-working member of the Committee, and to thank her for being
here today.
Let me begin by paying tribute to all the teachers and support
staff, not just in my constituency but around the country, who
have done everything possible to keep children learning, and to
the children and young people themselves, who have had to deal
with extremely difficult circumstances. I only wish that the
chair of the covid inquiry had not forgotten to mention the word
“children” in the draft terms of reference; I hope that that will
change.
To date, the Government have spent almost £5 billion on the
catch-up programme, which I warmly welcome, but, as our report
points out, more targeted efforts are needed to help our children
to recover from the pandemic. The impacts of school closures were
devastating for most of them. Many now face an epidemic of
educational inequality, a widening attainment gap, worsening
mental health, an increase in their safeguarding risks, and an
adverse effect on their lifetime chances. One study found that
children locked down at home spent an average of two and a half
hours each day doing school work, but one fifth of pupils did no
learning at home, or less than one hour each day.
Our report sets out four key findings. First, it notes that
disadvantaged pupils have been the worst hit. The Education
Policy Institute told us that disadvantaged pupils could be
“five, six, seven—in the worst case scenarios—eight months
behind”
their most affluent peers. There are regional inequalities too.
By the second half of the autumn term in 2020, the average
learning loss in maths for primary schools was 5.3 months in
Yorkshire and the Humber, compared with just 0.5 months in the
south-west.
By March 2021, the national tutoring programme, the Department’s
flagship programme, had reached 100% of its target in the
south-west, but just 58% in the north-east, 59% in the
north-west, and 60% in my region of the east. These regional
disparities should not be occurring.
Secondly, rates of persistent absence remain high, but without
up-to-date data from the Department we do not know how many
“ghost children” continue to experience severe levels of absence.
In December, the Department announced that rates of persistent
absence had risen to 16.3% in secondary schools in the autumn of
2020. That equates to almost 502,000 of the 3 million
secondary-age pupils. I strongly support the work of the
Children’s Commissioner in this regard. Her new report suggests
that 124,000 children were severely absent last year. However, we
do not yet have the Department’s official absence figures even
for the summer term of 2021. Without that data, we risk creating
an Oliver Twist generation of children, lost to the system
forever.
Thirdly, Randstad and the national tutoring programme are not
delivering for the most disadvantaged pupils. Our inquiry found
that the NTP had reached just 15% of its overall target. Some
headteachers described the “bureaucratic nightmare” of navigating
Randstad’s tuition hub, and said that there was a “lack of
communication” with schools about the programme. Concerningly,
Randstad has also reportedly removed the requirement to reach 65%
of children eligible for the pupil premium from its tutoring
contracts with providers.
On Friday, the Secretary of State announced that the Department
had agreed to publish mid-term data on the performance of the
NTP, and that the £65 million originally allocated to the tutor
and academic mentor NTP pillars would now go directly to the
school-led tutoring arm. We strongly support that move, which we
called for in our recommendations. I believe that all the money
should have gone to schools, because they would have known how
best to spend it, and could have been judged on the outcome.
Figures published by Randstad, mentioned by the Department,
suggest that more than 1 million young people have now started
tutoring courses, but there are questions to be asked about those
figures. For instance, 311,000 of these new starts were made in
the previous academic year, when the previous contractor, EEF,
was leading the roll-out of the NTP. In total, only 720,000 new
starts have been made this academic year, according to the
statistics. Moreover, Randstad has revealed that about one in six
pupils are enrolled on multiple courses, and are therefore
double-counted. Of course I am pleased that more young people are
accessing the help and support that they need to catch up on
their lost learning, but much greater effort is required to
target that support at those who need it the most. The Government
must ensure that Randstad shapes up. They have made some changes,
but if things do not improve dramatically they must cancel the
Randstad contract.
Finally, the Department needs to do more to support young
people’s mental health. Our Committee heard that the number of
children referred for mental health support in 2020 represented
an increase of nearly 60% in comparison with 2018. The impact of
social media was especially concerning. Research shows that, just
last year, 16.7% of 11 to 16-year-olds using social media agreed
that it had had a negative impact on their wellbeing. One in
three girls said that they were unhappy with their personal
appearance by the age of 14, and 78% of Barnardo’s practitioners
reported that children aged 11 to 15 had accessed unsuitable or
harmful content through social media. These are worrying trends.
Our report asks an important question: how can we ensure that the
catch-up programme delivers for the most disadvantaged?
First, we need more reliable and up-to-date data to establish the
full effect of the pandemic on children and young people. This
data must include regional breakdowns, and must pay due regard to
disadvantage and special educational needs. Greater statistical
transparency is also needed on the performance of Randstad and
the NTP.
Secondly, we need to end the spaghetti junction, as we call it,
of catch-up funding. It is a fragmented catch-up programme with
complex and bureaucratic funding applications that schools have
to navigate. Teachers know their pupils best, and our report
recommends that the funding schemes are simplified and merged
into one pot for schools to access and spend where the recovery
need is greatest. Any future initiative should direct funding to
schools using existing mechanisms for disadvantage, such as pupil
premium eligibility. Then, schools should be held accountable for
how they spend the funds on improvements for the children.
Thirdly, the Department should launch a pilot scheme in the
country’s most disadvantaged areas to explore the benefits that a
longer school day—in terms of extracurricular activity such as
sport, music and drama—could bring to pupils’ educational
attainment and mental health recovery. The Minister will know
that there is a wealth of statistics to show that such extra
activities improve both the mental health of children and their
educational attainment. This is topical, given that we have heard
mention of the online harms Bill. The Government should introduce
a social media levy on the profits of social media companies.
That could be distributed to schools to support better online
harm and mental health resilience training. For example, from a
2% levy, the Government could raise £100 million, which could be
spent on resilience for children. It would certainly concentrate
the minds of the social media companies.
Finally, the Department for Education should take really urgent
steps to address the issue of persistent and severe absence by
working with schools and local authorities proactively and
appointing attendance practitioners to work with parents, local
authorities and schools to return these children safely and
quickly into school. There are 13,000 children missing in year
11, a crucial exam year. The most disadvantaged schools have the
equivalent of a whole classroom missing. Dramatic action must be
taken by the Department to get these so-called ghost children
back into school and learning again.
Education catch-up must be for the long term. If the Department
is to make the case to the Treasury that the programme is making
a difference and if it is to get more funding for the future, it
has to prove that the programme is providing value for money for
the taxpayer with the existing funds and also, most importantly,
that the catch-up programme is really working for the most
disadvantaged pupils. Education should be the cornerstone for
levelling up, and every avenue should be taken to extend the
ladder of opportunity to every child. Charles Dickens wrote
of
“so many things forgotten, and so many more which might have been
repaired”.
If we are to ensure the catch-up is fit for purpose and to the
benefit of every child, we must act to fix it now.
(Bristol South) (Lab)
I thank the Chair of the Select Committee for his statement. We
have often worked on issues in our constituencies that share
similarities. I agree with him about the spaghetti junction of
the funding. How does he think we can support the Government in
unravelling this spaghetti junction and recognising, as he said,
that schools are the only people to be able to lead this
recovery, with the proper governance structures? Can we do more
to help?
I was pleased to visit the hon. Lady’s constituency when I was
the Skills Minister and to go to her wonderful FE college. As I
said earlier, and as we say in our report, the Government say
that they believe in school autonomy, so why not ensure that the
funds go direct to the schools so that they can spend them on the
catch-up programme as they see fit? The Government need to look
at long-term reform of the pupil premium to ensure that it
reflects the long-term disadvantaged, but why not give it to the
schools and then look at the metrics to see how the children are
improving in terms of the catch-up? When they need to intervene
and offer support, they can do so. At the moment, there are
different funding streams and it is incredibly difficult and
bureaucratic for the schools to deal with these funds. It just
makes life complicated. As we know, the Randstad part of these
strands is not working properly, despite significant amounts of
taxpayers’ money being put into it.
(Liverpool, Riverside)
(Lab)
It is a real privilege to serve under the chairmanship of the
right hon. Member for Harlow () on the Education Committee.
As we know, recommended £15 billion to
meet the needs of catch-up, and the £5 billion that is available
falls far short of that. The fact is that the national tutoring
programme is failing to meet pupils’ needs at the moment. Does
the right hon. Gentleman agree that the contract needs to be
terminated as soon as possible?
I am very close to saying yes, the contract should be terminated.
We have said that Randstad should perhaps be given one last
chance. The Government made some changes last Friday, but if they
announced today that they were terminating the contract with
Randstad, I would certainly not be upset. I suspect that most
teachers and support staff would not be upset either. I have
always worked for more funding for schools, and I absolutely get
that there is a debate about more money, but my point is that, if
the Department goes for more money when the £5 billion it has
already been given is not working properly, not giving kids what
they need and not giving the taxpayer value for money, how can
the Department go to the Treasury and say that actually it should
be £10 billion or £15 billion if the existing money is not being
used to get it right?
Madam Deputy Speaker ( )
I call the shadow Minister, .
(Warwick and Leamington)
(Lab)
I thank the Chair and the Select Committee for putting together
this report. This is clearly not my specialist subject, as the
right hon. Gentleman knows from last week, but it is clearly not
Randstad’s either. The entire programme is, as the tutoring
providers have said, shambolic and at risk of catastrophic
failure. Having sat on Select Committees, I appreciate how words
are carefully chosen and I see that the report states on page
30:
“It is not clear that the National Tutoring Programme will
deliver for the pupils that need it most.”
Sometimes words get argued over. Perhaps the right hon. Gentleman
could elaborate on that. As I understand it, the requirement that
65% of places should be allocated to children on the pupil
premium was dropped. Could he explain a bit more on that?
I thank the hon. Gentleman for his questions. On the first point,
it is not just our report saying this; the Department for
Education itself said in its December report that there were
significant problems with the catch-up programme. It is quoted in
the report. He may have been reading the direct quote from the
Department. I forget whether that was the exact quote, but there
was one from the Department itself saying that there were
significant problems with the catch-up. I beg his pardon, but
what was his second point?
I asked about the 65% threshold.
I have been worried about this, and I have raised it with the
Minister on the Floor of the House and in the Select Committee.
The Minister has said that that target remains, although there is
some flexibility in terms of some of the tutoring groups. I am
absolutely clear that the catch-up programme should reach the
most disadvantaged. My worry is that it is not, and we will
continue to press the Government and make sure that it does.
Madam Deputy Speaker ( )
I thank the Select Committee Chair for his statement and for
answering the questions put to him.
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