Helping children catch up on the best part of a year out of the classroom is one of the biggest tasks facing the government. On Wednesday, Gavin Williamson announced an extra £400 million in funding which schools can use to run summer programmes and other catch-up projects. That’s on top of £300 million allocated last month and £1 billion announced last year.
Ministers hope that their Recovery Premium will help schools support particularly disadvantaged pupils, who have fallen further behind than their peers as a result of having to do remote learning for so long. But they are also under pressure to show that they are thinking about the long-term, as even the best summer schools will not repair the damage to learning, confidence and other skills caused by the pandemic. At Prime Minister’s Questions, Boris Johnson had a rather bad-tempered exchange with Wes Streeting about this. The Prime Minister told the Labour MP that he was ‘wrong’ about the amount of funding being allocated, but added:
Yes, we will have to do more, because this is the biggest challenge our country faces.
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