Schools could face more “direct questions” as part of a new “national action plan” to tackle the ongoing impact of the Covid pandemic on learning loss, a senior government adviser and a Department for Education source have warned.
The action plan would sit alongside the beleaguered National Tutoring Programme (NTP) to boost school Covid catch-up efforts, after the DfE acknowledged that its existing interventions - introduced in 2020 as a “national priority” - have failed to reach all pupils who need it, Tes has learned.
Tim Oates (pictured), an assessment expert who has been a long-term strategic adviser to the DfE, said government “levers” can only achieve so much, and called for a “concerted and unified approach between schools and the state”.
He said that the catch-up strategy is now being discussed in government “as a pressing national concern”.
Mr Oates, known to be a close ally of schools minister Nick Gibb, and hailed as one of the key architects of the minister’s “knowledge-rich” curriculum, said the next steps must be treated as a “national action plan”.
His comments come as the Covid inquiry prepares to examine the impact of the national response to the pandemic on the education of pupils and students.
Meanwhile, a DfE insider told Tes that the department and schools watchdog Ofsted could expect “more direct answers” from headteachers on their use of national catch-up schemes in future.
There has been widespread criticism that efforts to help pupils catch up on lost learning caused by disruption to their schooling during the pandemic have been drastically underfunded by the government, despite it being hailed as a “national priority” by Boris Johnson, who was prime minister when it was first launched.
The DfE’s catch-up tsar Sir Kevan Collins resigned after his £15 billion education recovery plan was rejected in 2021. The department instead counter-offered with a £1 billion pledge, later increased to £5 billion.
Schools not using National Tutoring Programme
Mr Oates said: “We now know that not all of it [the catch-up funding] reached the young people who needed it.”
But he added: “Not all of the funding obtained from the Treasury was actually called on by schools and not only because it required matched funding.”
Figures released in April revealed that about one-third of schools in England have not yet used any catch-up funding so far this year.
Headteachers said this was because the scheme was only partially subsidised and school budgets were “already stretched beyond breaking point”.
Mr Oates, who on top of his advisory role is group director of assessment research and development at Cambridge University Press and Assessment, acknowledged the difficulties that some schools experienced with funding.
He said some were “highly pressured” and “found it difficult to navigate the [funding] application process” owing to high workloads exacerbated by high teacher and pupil absence.
He said the “multifaceted and distinctive” problems and the “Covid effect”, which has seen a differentiation of impact, made it “incredibly hard” for government to target support, but added that there was more schools could do.
“All the evidence is that the severe problems of child development, equity and attainment which were caused by the pandemic are still with us, not behind us.”
For example, Mr Oates said that the experiences of early years and primary “point to serious issues of cognitive and social development”.
A survey earlier this year revealed that almost half of pupils in Reception were not developmentally ready for school when they began, according to primary school teachers.
Mr Oates is worried that a rhetoric of “back to normal”, which he said is espoused by both society and the government, could be underestimating the extent of the impact of the pandemic on pupils, including those born during lockdowns, many of whom will be starting school next year.
He said he wants to see the gaps that each individual pupil has being addressed via one-to-one work, more effective use of teaching assistants, a focus on resolving socialisation problems and using a lot more oracy during classes.
Mr Oates said that better use of teaching assistants, in particular, was key to returning to pre-pandemic engagement levels. He added that TAs should be better deployed to increase one-to-one and small group work, “to secure emotional engagement at school” and address “basic skills gaps” via “accelerated learning”.
These are actions that “hold the promise of reducing” teacher workload “at the same time as improving equity and attainment”, he said.
Society tends to believe “in big levers pulled by government”, Mr Oates said.
“But when the problem is so distributed and fine grained, we know that big levers are just not going to be effective.”
He added that the “depth and potential duration of the Covid effects in education” mean that a “concerted and unified approach between schools and the state” is needed, falling into “national action plan territory”.
“This will be achieved through productive, evidence-based joint action.”
More direct questions from Ofsted
Mr Oates said that ministers within the DfE “did very well” to extract previous funding for catch-up from the Treasury.
However, Tes understands that the government is unlikely to back any new plan with new funding.
Mr Oates said this is a “chance to rethink the use of resources already at our disposal”.
On the realities of lost learning, a DfE insider told Tes that while everything “might seem on the surface…like it’s back to normal…there’ll be massive gaps in [pupils’] knowledge in areas”.
They added that the failure of catch-up funding to reach every student who needed it is not “necessarily…an issue of ambition”.
The DfE source told Tes privately that it is almost certain that every student who needed help “won’t have got it”, but denied this was down to failures on the department’s part.
Instead, they referred to the “reality” that you “can’t control these things from…Whitehall, you need to work with the sector and give heads responsibility for how they’re going to help children”.
“[Schools] need to be really focused on assessing kids in all areas and making sure that they’re putting things in place to help them, but those things aren’t radical and revolutionary new things.”
The same source told Tes there was “potential” for the DfE to move into a world where it begins to ask “more direct questions” of schools and “the extent to which schools are drawing down on those programmes if the results for the kids who need it aren’t improving”.
“If Ofsted goes into a school, and they see that provision for the most disadvantaged kids isn’t great and schools aren’t drawing down on things like the teacher development programmes or…approved programmes…then I think maybe there’ll be a bit more of a light shone on that or more questions asked,” they said.
“Anything we can do to nudge schools towards using programmes, which could have a real impact for those kids…would be helpful.”
Ofsted inspectors already look at how leaders and governors spend catch-up funding, alongside “their rationale for this spending and its intended impact on the learning and progress of disadvantaged pupils”, according to the Ofsted school inspection handbook.
‘Woefully unambitious’ funding
Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said it was “shameful that a comprehensive and properly funded catch-up plan wasn’t put in place long ago” and decried “another case of the DfE blaming schools” for its own “shortcomings”.
“The catch-up funding provided so far has been woefully unambitious. If the DfE really wants to address the failure of catch-up funding to reach every student, they should be giving the full allocation for the National Tutoring Programme to schools without requiring them to add additional money from their own budgets. They should also be looking at increasing the pupil premium and weighting it more heavily in favour of those in persistent poverty,” he said.
School leaders already take responsibility for helping children to catch up on lost learning but this would give those facing the biggest challenges greater agency to spend funds in the most appropriate way for their setting, he added.
Mr Barton said it was “clear” that the pandemic had “left behind significant problems in terms of children who are struggling with their mental health and wellbeing, as well as consequent issues of poor attendance and behaviour”.
“All of this is likely to affect pupils’ outcomes and, in the long run, life chances, so it is essential that we get a grip of this as soon as possible.”
He said the effort had been held back by the government’s “fixation” with the National Tutoring Programme, “which has been surrounded with a level of complexity that could only have been dreamed up in Whitehall”.
“Frankly, this should all have been done long before we got to this point. A national action plan - properly funded and coordinated - is long overdue. But this will only work if there are sufficient leaders, teachers and support staff to implement it. Currently, they are leaving the profession at a rate of knots,” Mr Barton added.
Paul Whiteman, general secretary of the NAHT school leaders’ union, said it was a reality that the government had “consistently let down pupils and schools throughout the pandemic”.
“Their support during the most challenging days of the crisis was woefully lacking and the recovery support has been entirely insufficient,” he said.
Mr Whiteman added that teachers and leaders had worked tirelessly for pupils to receive social, emotional and academic support, and “the funding crisis that schools are facing is making this crucial task more difficult than it should be”.
“Schools do not need yet more centralised action plans or greater scrutiny. They need adequate resources to enable them to get on with the work they have already begun,” he said.
