Recommendation 27

We challenged the Department on why it had not set basic expectations for schools’ provision during the 2019/20 summer term. It highlighted that the circumstances had been unprecedented, and that schools had been asked to work in entirely new ways, remaining open to vulnerable children and children of critical workers but closing to other children. In this context, the Department had felt it was right to relieve pressure on schools and “ask less, not more in that moment”. The Department explained that it had also needed to learn what good looked like under those circumstances, and that it would have been a challenge early in the pandemic to set out expectations that were well founded. However, it conceded that in hindsight, if it had understood how long the period of disruption would last, it might have done something different in the expectations it had set out.49 Catch-up learning programme