Fifty-Fifth Report - Education recovery in schools in England

Effective recovery relies on pupils being at school but absence is higher than it was before the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly among disadvantaged pupils. In the autumn and spring terms of 2021/22, the average absence rate for all pupils was 7.4%, compared with 4.5% for the same terms before the pandemic in 2018/19. For disadvantaged pupils, the rate was 10.4% in 2021/22, compared with 7.2% in 2018/19. The Department says that attendance rates are improving as levels of illness reduce. It is trying to tackle pupil absence in several ways, with leadership being provided by the Attendance Action Alliance which brings together stakeholders from across the school system. The Department believes it has set strong expectations and made clear that responsibility for attendance is shared between parents, schools and local authorities. It is collecting better data, drawn directly from schools’ own systems, which it can look at in detail in real time. It also provides data back to schools to allow them to benchmark themselves against other schools. Recommendation 2: The Department should develop a better understanding of why disadvantaged pupils have higher rates of absence than others and, in addition to its ongoing work on attendance, take targeted action to reduce absence rates among disadvantaged pupils.

We share the Department’s disappointment that 13% of schools did not take up the National Tutoring Programme in 2021/22, meaning pupils at these schools missed out on the benefits of subsidised tutoring. Take-up of the two centrally run National Tutoring Programme schemes was below the Department’s expectations, but the introduction of a school-led tutoring element gave schools more control and significantly boosted take-up. In 2021/22, 87% of schools in England participated in some form of tutoring under the National Tutoring Programme, but the Department described the fact that 13% of schools had not taken part as the “biggest disappointment” of the recovery programme. The Department says it has put a good deal of resource into persuading schools of the benefits of the National Tutoring Programme. The Department added that there was continuing evaluation of the 6 Education recovery in schools in England National Tutoring Programme to ensure tutoring was delivering the best value for money, and that it had committed to investigate how it could further develop longitudinal studies. Recommendation 3: The Department needs to do more to understand why some schools are not taking part in the National Tutoring Programme and take more effective action to increase participation, informed by evaluation of the first two years of the scheme.

We are not confident that schools will be able to afford to provide tutoring on the scale required to support all the pupils who need it once the Department withdraws its subsidy. By the end of 2021/22, pupils had started 2.5 million courses under the National Tutoring Programme. The Department made available funding of £594 million to subsidise the cost of tutoring in that period. But it is reducing its subsidy for tutoring under the National Tutoring Programme each year, with the result that the rate of subsidy will drop from 75% in 2020/21 to 25% in 2023/24. After that, schools will have to cover the full cost of tutoring from other sources, such as pupil premium funding. School budgets are already under significant pressure. Written evidence submitted to us shows that some schools are struggling to fund the cost of tutoring in 2022/23, when the Department is still providing a 60% subsidy. The Department wants tutoring to become an integral part of the school system, but it is clear that without extra funding schools will find it difficult to maintain tutoring on a comparable scale to that currently being provided. The Department has committed to model the impact of removing the subsidy on the affordability of tutoring for schools. Recommendation 4: The Department should monitor how much tutoring is being provided, in 2022/23 and 2023/24 when it is providing a subsidy, and in subsequent years, and intervene if tutoring levels drop significantly.

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

On the basis of a report by the Comptroller and Auditor General, we took evidence from the Department for Education (the Department) on education recovery in schools.2

Evidence submissions from the Children and Young People’s Mental Health Coalition, Young Minds and Adoption UK highlighted the impact that the COVID-19 pandemic had had on young people’s mental health.10 The Department agreed with Young Minds’ recommendation calling for a whole-school approach to mental health and wellbeing, and said that this was important because of the range of different needs. It told us that, with the funding currently available, its ambition was for its programme of mental health support teams to reach 35% of schools and that it was on track to achieve this.11 Closing the disadvantage gap

Disadvantaged pupils have, on average, lower attainment than other pupils, and results from the Key Stage 1, 2 and 4 tests taken in 2022 showed that this disadvantage gap had grown.12 The Department told us that it had been successfully closing the disadvantage gap before the COVID-19 pandemic, and that the subsequent widening of the gap had been one of the worst and most dispiriting effects of the pandemic. It explained that it used a metric called the disadvantage gap index to measure the difference in attainment between disadvantaged pupils and their peers. A value of zero would indicate there was no disadvantage gap. The disadvantage gap index at Key Stage 2 (the end of primary school) was 3.34 in 2011, and the index fell steadily to 2.90 in 2018. In 2022, it had risen to 3.23, not quite as high as in 2011 but going significantly backwards.13 Written evidence we received from NASUWT, Action Tutoring and The Tutor Trust also highlighted that the growth in the attainment gap between disadvantaged and other pupils during the COVID-19 pandemic was a particular concern.14

We asked the Department when we would see the disadvantage gap start to close. The Department insisted that closing the gap in attainment had been the relentless focus of its education recovery work, and that almost every element of the recovery programme, including the National Tutoring Programme and the recovery premium, had been tilted towards disadvantaged pupils. It also said that while another important part of the recovery programme, investment in teacher education and training, benefited every pupil, good-quality teaching benefited disadvantaged pupils the most.15

The Department told us that it hoped to see the disadvantage gap narrowing again from summer 2023.16 It accepted that one could always do more, but believed it now had a strong package of measures in place. The measures included things that were most likely to drive engagement from all pupils and particularly disadvantaged pupils. The Department also said that the way it had incentivised teachers to work in the most disadvantaged places was an important part of its efforts to close the disadvantage gap.17

We pressed the Department on when it hoped to eliminate the disadvantage gap completely. It told us that no country in the world had completely eliminated its 10 ERS0003 The Children and Young People’s Mental Health Coalition page 1; ERS0005 Young Minds pages 1–3; ERS0006 Adoption UK pages 2 and 4 11 Qq 60, 62 12 C&AG’s Report, para 3.16 13 Q 28 14 ERS0001 NASUWT, the Teacher’s Union, pages 2–3; ERS0002 Action Tutoring, pages 2–3; ERS0007 The Tutor Trust, pages 2–3 15 Q 28 16 Q 28 17 Qq 29–30 Education recovery in schools in England 9 disadvantage gap so it was reluctant to commit to a date. However, the Department said that it should be able to reduce the disadvantage gap at least as quickly as it had done in the 10 years before the COVID-19 pandemic, and that it ought to set itself the challenge of going as fast, or faster, in closing the gap as it had done previously.18 We note, however, that this would mean potentially taking as much as another decade to get back to the position before the pandemic. Pupils’ absence from school

The Department recognises that a key element of improving attainment is for children to be in school.19 Rates of pupil absence from school are, however, higher than they were before the COVID-19 pandemic.20 Written evidence we received from Action Tutoring pointed to increases in pupil absence since before the pandemic, and highlighted the stark gap in attendance between disadvantaged pupils and their peers.21 In the autumn and spring terms of 2021/22, the average absence rate for all pupils was 7.4%, compared with 4.5% for the same terms before the pandemic in 2018/19. For disadvantaged pupils, the rate was 10.4% in 2021/22, compared with 7.2% in 2018/19.22

The Department told us that illness, rather than unauthorised absence, was the biggest driver of the increase in absence, particularly persistent absence. It noted that this year’s figures were for the autumn term only, when there had been quite a lot of illness. A pupil would only need to have missed seven days during the term to be classed as persistently absent, and quite a lot of people who got flu would have been off for seven days.23 The Department said that the data showed that attendance was lower on Fridays than on other days of the week, and a little lower on Mondays, but did not indicate why. It also noted that anecdotally this pattern had also existed before the pandemic.24

We asked the Department what its plans were to deal with pupil absences. It told us that attendance rates were improving as levels of illness reduced, but there was more to be done.25 The Department said that a lot of its work on attendance started from the principle of providing support, particularly for children who had other disadvantages such as vulnerable children or children with special educational needs and disabilities.26 It highlighted that attendance for children in care, which had previously been worse than for other children, was now better because of the support they were given by social workers and virtual school heads.27

The Department said it had set a strong expectation that attendance was everyone’s responsibility, including parents, schools and local authorities. It also stressed the importance of leadership and data. It explained that national leadership was being provided by the Attendance Action Alliance which brought together key players from across the school system who could make a difference, and this approach was increasingly being 18 Qq 31–32 19 Q 49 20 C&AG’s Report, para 3.19 21 ERS0002 Action Tutoring, page 4 22 C&AG’s Report, para 3.19 23 Q 68 24 Qq 52–53 25 Q 49 26 Q 37 27 Q 36 10 Education recovery in schools in England replicated at local level. The Department said the Alliance enabled a better understanding of what worked through the whole system. The range of different approaches included work with individual parents, direct support such as phoning parents up in the morning, and mentoring activities.28

The Department highlighted that it was now collecting better data, drawn directly from state-funded schools’ own management information systems, which it could look at in detail, in real time. Schools voluntarily signed up to provide data and about 80% were doing so. The Department told us how it was now providing benchmarking data back to schools to allow them to compare themselves against other similar schools.29 In addition, better data allowed the Department and other partners to see trends, issues and solutions in a way that had not been possible before.30 Support for pupils with special educational needs and disabilities

We have been regularly pressing the Department to improve its support for pupils with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) since we reported on this subject in May 2020.31 The Department finally published the results of its SEND review in a Green Paper in March 2022, setting out proposals for consultation.32 The Green Paper said that the Department would publish a national delivery plan later in 2022. In the event, the SEND and Alternative Provision Improvement Plan was not published until March 2023. The Department plans to establish a change programme which will work over the next two to three years with selected local authorities in nine regions, meaning that putting actions into effect nationally will extend to 2025 and beyond.33

We asked the Department why the process was taking so long and specifically why it was not expecting to have a full set of new national standards even by the end of 2025. The Department said that it had made a commitment to start with the national standards that touched on the things that it knew people wanted most, on autism and mental health for example. It wanted to go as quickly as it could in creating the national standards, but it knew that the standards would only work if it co-created them with others across the SEND system. The Department also said that, as well as making sure that the education, health and care process was streamlined, it planned to focus on some of the national standards that would allow parents, teachers and the public know what should ordinarily available, including in mainstream school settings.34 28 Qq 49–50 29 Q 51 30 Qq 49, 54 31 Committee of Public Accounts, Support for children with special educational needs and disabilities, First Report of Session 2019–21, HC 85, March 2022 32 HM Government, SEND Review: Right support, right place, right time, Government consultation on the SEND and alternative provision system in England, CP 624, March 2022 33 HM Government, Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) and Alternative Provision (AP) Improvement Plan, CP 800, March 2023 34 Qq 55–57 Education recovery in schools in England 11 2 Embedding education recovery Schools’ engagement with the National Tutoring Programme

By the end of 2021/22, pupils had started 2.5 million courses under the National Tutoring Programme.35 However, take-up of the two centrally run National Tutoring Programme schemes was below the Department’s expectations: in 2021/22, the number of courses was 45% of the Department’s target for the tuition partners scheme and 65% for the academic mentors scheme.36 The Department said that this shortfall had been outweighed by take-up of school-led tutoring, which gave schools more control, was cheaper and had boosted take-up. As a result, the Department had exceeded its near two million overall target for the number of courses started in 2021/22.37 The Department also said that introducing school-led tutoring, along with encouraging tutoring organisations to expand their operations into areas with less tutoring availability, had led to an increase in take-up in those areas, particularly in the north of England.38

In 2021/22, 87% of schools in England participated in some form of tutoring under the National Tutoring Programme.39 When we asked the Department why 13% of schools had not taken part at all in the National Tutoring Programme, it told us that this had been the “biggest disappointment” of the recovery programme.40

The Department said there were a range of different reasons for why schools chose to engage with tutoring; some would be about their view of the value of tutoring and some would be about the process of engaging people to do tutoring. It told us that it was seeking to reduce the number of schools that had not engaged with the National Tutoring Programme and was putting a good deal of resource into persuading those schools of the benefits of tutoring, through contacting them directly and through identifying what had worked well.41

The Department told us of a number of ways it had been sharing best practice on the National Tutoring Programme. These included offering direct support to schools and having webinars and shared promotions and research. It highlighted in particular research by the Education Endowment Foundation and the National Foundation for Educational Research that had embedded guidance in schools to support effective tutoring.42 The Department also noted that some 70% of school leaders were following Education Endowment Foundation evidence in using their recovery premium funding. It described that evidence as the “gold standard”.43 We asked the Department what lessons it had learned from the first two years that it would apply to the next two years. It told us that the most important was the power of data to target the pupils and places that 35 C&AG’s Report, Key facts 36 C&AG’s Report, para 12 37 Qq 48, 75, 76 38 Qq 47, 48 39 C&AG’s Report, para 2.27 40 Q 92 41 Q 92 42 Q 45 43 Q 83 12 Education recovery in schools in England need it most. The Department added that there was continuing evaluation of the National Tutoring Programme to ensure tutoring was delivering the best value for money, and that it had committed to investigate how it could further develop longitudinal studies.44 Withdrawal of the Department’s subsidy for tutoring

The Department provided funding of £594 million for the National Tutoring Programme taking 2020/21 and 2021/22 together, and plans to provide a further £527 million in the following two years.45 It is progressively reducing the rate of subsidy it provides for tutoring, from 75% in 2020/21 to 25% in 2023/24, so schools are having to cover a growing proportion of the costs from other sources, such as pupil premium funding. After 2023/24, schools will have to cover the full cost of tutoring themselves.46

Written evidence we received from The Tutor Trust noted that some schools, particularly smaller primary schools, were struggling to fund the cost of tutoring in 2022/23, when the Department was providing a subsidy of 60%.47 We also heard from Action Tutoring that, with the drop in the subsidy to 25% in 2023/24, more schools would struggle and essential interventions such as tutoring might be relegated.48

We asked the Department how, as the level of subsidy reduced, schools would be able to meet the cost of continuing to participate in the National Tutoring Programme. The Department told us that it had always been clear that the subsidy would taper and, if tutoring was to become a normal and embedded part of the school system as the Department intended, it would have to be funded increasingly through mainstream school budgets. It assured us that it wanted schools to be sufficiently funded to do all the things they needed to do for their pupils, and that overall school funding in the current year was going up by something in the order of £4 billion.49

The Department acknowledged, however, that the fall in the level of subsidy was significant and told us it had accepted the NAO’s recommendation that it should model the impact of moving from 60% to 25% in a single year.50 It also undertook to keep monitoring this area and, if there was a significant drop-off in tutoring, to look again at the whole issue of funding to see what more needed to be done.51

We asked the Department how it would create a sustainable tuition market, given the different skills needed for tutoring and classroom teaching. It told us that quality was key and that, important though finding additional tutors was, effective practice and use of evidence for how effective tutoring is delivered were essential. The Department emphasised the National Tutoring Programme’s focus on training. Over 20,000 people had been through that training, which it said had resulted in a long-term legacy of more people in schools skilled to deliver one-to-one and small group tutoring.52 44 Qq 104, 112, 113 45 C&AG’s Report, Figure 4 46 C&AG’s Report, para 1.17 47 ERS0007 The Tutor Trust, page 9 48 ERS0002 Action Tutoring page 7 49 Qq 93, 95 50 Q 95 51 Q 96 52 Q 110 Education recovery in schools in England 13 Tracking progress towards the ambitions in the Schools White Paper

In 2021, we recommended that the Department should set out clear metrics that it would use to monitor the catch-up programme, and indicate what level of performance would represent success, and the Department agreed with this recommendation.53 However, although the Department recognises that it needs to demonstrate what has been achieved for its spending on education recovery, it has not set targets for the impact it wants to achieve from the recovery interventions because it now regards these as part of its overall activity to improve pupils’ attainment.54

In the March 2022 Schools White Paper, the Department set ambitions that, by 2030, 90% of primary school children would achieve the expected standard in reading, writing and maths, and the percentage of children meeting the expected standard in the worst performing areas would have increased by a third. The ambitions for secondary schools were for the national GCSE average grade in both English language and maths to increase from 4.5 in 2019 to 5.0 by 2030.55 The Department has not set milestones between now and 2030 to show progress towards these ambitions.56 We asked the Department how, without milestones, it was going to track progress. The Department agreed that the long- term ambition in the Schools White Paper invited a recognition of the importance of setting progress measures. It had not done that in the White Paper, but expected to be able to make public its plans for primary school pupils in the next couple of months.57

The Department pointed us to the performance metrics that it published every year in its Outcome Delivery Plan. It said that it published a wide range of metrics at Key Stages 2 and 4, and the results of Key Stage 1 tests such as the phonics screening check. The Department assured us that it used all of these measures to hold itself to account, and that it expected other people to use them to hold it to account for progress.58 We note, however, that the Department’s most recent Outcome Delivery Plan was published in July 2021, nearly two years ago.59 53 Committee of Public Accounts, COVID-19: Support for children’s education, Third Report of Session 2021–22, HC 240, 26 May 2021; HM Treasury, Treasury Minutes – Government responses to the Committee of Public Accounts on the First to the Sixth reports from Session 2021–22, August 2021 (page 11) 54 C&AG’s Report, para 3.3 55 HM Government, Opportunity for all: strong schools with great teachers for your child, March 2022, page 11 56 C&AG’s Report, para 3.4 57 Q 101 58 Q 102 59 Department for Education, DfE Outcome Delivery Plan: 2021 to 2022, published 15 July 2021 14 Education recovery in schools in England