Funding given to schools to help with the provision of catch-up support was “insufficient” to ensure that pupils recovered from the impact of the pandemic, a government-commissioned review has found.
Recovery Premium funding was an additional grant provided to schools in 2021-22 - and linked to pupil premium numbers - to support efforts to help pupil premium pupils whose education had been disrupted by the pandemic.
But school leaders interviewed for a Department for Education-commissioned report said that they had had to use additional school funding to cover the costs of specific recovery interventions, with one saying the money came “nowhere close” to what was needed.
The report, School Recovery Strategies, was compiled by Ipsos UK, the Centre for Education and Youth, and researchers at Sheffield Hallam University, and involved interviews, case studies and an online survey.
Interviews found that leaders were “grateful” for the support through the Recovery Premium, but they also highlighted its limitations.
The limitations of Recovery Premium school funding
One senior leader told researchers: “[It comes] nowhere close. Ideally [we] would have had a primary teacher in full time for reading recovery for Y7/8. Plus another SEND specialist just focused on maths. We could have done with so much more counselling and support.”
Leaders also expressed frustrations about the perceived “bureaucratic burden of accounting for spending much earlier in the pandemic”, and said this “detracted” from the focus on the current level of need and getting students ready for exams.
“School leaders noted that the government’s guidance tended to focus on pupil premium students, and staff felt this was too narrow because the pandemic had impacted on all students in different ways. Schools felt they needed greater levels of long-term recovery funding to respond to the diverse range of needs,” the report says.
But despite the criticism, there was also some praise for the fund, with one primary leader saying they “loved” that it was up to the school to decide how to use it, adding: “There was a recognition that we know best what our children need.”
The report, which looks broadly at recovery strategies in 2021-22, also says that schools highlighted the mental health and wellbeing needs of their pupils, with secondaries, and schools with higher proportions of pupils receiving free school meals (FSM) and with SEND, more likely to report higher levels of need.
And it adds that school leaders “identified a shortage of external provision and local specialist support as a barrier to efforts to support pupils’ mental health and wellbeing”.
High absence of teachers and students was also highlighted as a barrier to catch-up, with the reports saying that the disruption to teaching and learning in schools “affected attainment, progression and recovery interventions”.
“As such, progress across the core skills of reading, writing and maths was reported as uneven in both primary and secondary schools”, the report adds.
