Recommendation 15

The NAO found that the pandemic had disproportionately impacted specific groups of people. For example, disrupted schooling is likely to have longer-term adverse effects on children from disadvantaged backgrounds. The Education Endowment Foundation predicted that schools closures in the 2019/20 academic year could widen the attainment gap between disadvantaged children and their peers by an average of 36%.33 We therefore asked the Cabinet Office about the widening of the education attainment gap between disadvantaged children and their peers during the pandemic and how the government was monitoring the catch-up schemes set up by the Department for Education to determine if they were effective. It explained that the Department for Education had evaluation frameworks in place for these programmes and progress was reported regularly to the Prime Minister, who monitored the effectiveness of interventions through the newly established Delivery Unit. The Cabinet Office acknowledged that monitoring educational attainment in real time is challenging and that gathering information on this takes time.34 Transparency and openness