Recommendation 5

The Department has no interim targets to track progress towards the 2030 attainment ambitions set out in the Schools White Paper. The Department has not specified the impact it wants to achieve from its interventions to support education recovery because it regards these as part of its wider efforts to improve pupils’ attainment. In the March 2022 Schools White Paper, the Department set ambitions for pupils’ attainment, by 2030, in literacy and numeracy at the end of primary school and secondary school, but it has not yet set milestones to show progress towards these ambitions. It plans to make public, in the next couple of months, its plans for tracking progress made by primary school pupils. The Department pointed to its Outcome Delivery Plan as the means by which it publishes the performance metrics that measure progress. We note, however, that the most recent Outcome Delivery Plan dates from July 2021, nearly two years ago, meaning that the Department has not provided updated metrics since then. Recommendation 5: The Department should set out measures of progress for the 2030 attainment targets (starting with the measures for primary pupils which it should publish by the 2023 summer parliamentary recess) and report progress against the measures to Parliament each year. Education recovery in schools in England 7 1 Supporting disadvantaged and vulnerable pupils