Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Is Gavin Williamson doing enough for deprived children?

Gavin Williamson (photo: Getty)

There are just days until all pupils return to English schools, and Conservative MPs are becoming increasingly concerned about what state many of these students will be in when they arrive back in the classroom after the best part of a year trying to learn from home.

At today’s Education Questions in the House of Commons, a number of backbenchers pressed Education Secretary Gavin Williamson on the work the government is doing to get the most disadvantaged children back up to speed. Both Jack Brereton and Julian Sturdy had tabled questions asking ‘what support his department is providing to help children catch up on lost learning during the Covid-19 outbreak’. Williamson’s response was to point to the £1.7 billion in funding announced over the past few months for ‘helping education settings boost pupils’ learning, including additional funding for tutoring, early language support and summer schools’, as well as the appointment of Sir Kevan Collins as the education recovery commissioner. Both backbenchers, though, responded by pointing out that the most deprived children had fallen further behind than their peers. Sturdy asked the minister to ‘clarify how he proposes to target support to reach students who have fallen behind most over the past year – those who have been really affected by this lockdown’, while Brereton pointed out that ‘children in areas of high deprivation… have had less teaching time during the pandemic’. They were followed by Education Select Committee chair Robert Halfon, who worried that a previous programme of summer schools in 2013 saw only 50 per cent of the disadvantaged pupils who were invited actually attend.

Later in the session, more Conservative MPs pushed Williamson on what the government might do to repair the damage done by a year of remote learning – and he gave a number of significant answers.



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