This National Audit Office (NAO) report examines the Education Department’s support for children’s education during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic between March and July 2020, and its action to help children catch up on the learning they lost during that period. The report covers the Department’s overall response to the pandemic; the support provided for children’s learning, both in school and remotely; and the impact of disrupted schooling on children.
The Department for Education took action to support schools and pupils in response to COVID-19, including ensuring that schools remained open for vulnerable children and funding online resources for those learning at home. Aspects of its response, however, could have been done better or more quickly, and therefore been more effective in mitigating the learning pupils lost as a result of the disruption.
The Department had no pre-existing plan for managing mass disruption to schooling on the scale caused by COVID-19. From April, the Department developed COVID-19 response plans to support schools and vulnerable children. It also established nine regional education and children's teams (REACT), which focused particularly on vulnerable children. However, it was not until the end of June that it began to formulate a plan that set out objectives, milestones and risks across the Department. The Department has not yet systematically evaluated its response to the early stages of the pandemic to identify lessons for potential future disruption to schooling.
In the early stages, recognising the challenges that schools were facing, the Department set no requirements for in-school and remote learning, but it gave more direction as the pandemic progressed. The Department decided that, for the 2020/21 academic year, it needed to make clearer schools' responsibilities for providing remote learning given the continued disruption, and placed a legal duty on schools to deliver this learning. It also strengthened its expectations about the quality of online and offline resources that schools should provide to pupils learning remotely.
Most vulnerable children did not attend school between late March and the end of the summer term, increasing risks to their safety and welfare. The proportion who attended school or college remained below 11% from 23 March to late May, rising to a weekly average of 26% by the end of the summer term.