Appendix 1
London Assembly Education Panel – 30 September 2020
Transcript of Agenda Item 9 – The Impact of COVID-19 School Closures on Education Inequality in London
Jennette Arnold OBE AM (Chair): That brings us to today’s main item for discussion on the impact of COVID-19 school closures on education inequality in London. Can I welcome our guests? We have Joanne McCartney, Deputy Mayor for Education and Childcare - welcome, Joanne - and Stuart Darke, Regional Organiser, Greater London Regional Centre, for the NASUWT. Welcome, Stuart. I did check earlier, and I think everybody is happy with first name terms. We have with us Rebecca Montacute, Research and Policy Manager, Sutton Trust; Rob Coe, Senior Associate, Education Endowment Foundation (EEF); and Sarah Wilkins, Senior Manager, Education and Youth Team, Greater London Authority (GLA).
It is nice when we know the public are following us and are interested in our work. A constituent has set out the impact that school closures are having on her, and the testing regime, and I just thought I would read in what she had to say to me:
“Dear Jennette,
I have three children. My middle child returned to school on Thursday, 10 September. On Monday, 28 September, we received a letter from the school telling us that she needed to self-isolate for two weeks as a close contact had tested positive for coronavirus. By the time she returns to school, she will have spent barely 50% of this academic year at school. This could also be a recurring problem. There is no limit on the amount of time students may have to self-isolate this year. With no access to testing to ascertain who needs to isolate, there is no guarantee that my children will be able to attend school regardless of whether schools are open or not. She could return to school after two weeks or a few days and then be expected to self-isolate again for two weeks. Lockdown has disproportionately affected her, especially as she did not have her own personal laptop. During the summer we did manage to be able to afford one and she is now able to do her schoolwork. The impact on our family has been immense. I shudder to think what effect this is having on families who are in a less beneficial situation to ours.”
I just think that sets the scene. To all our guests, if they could just briefly respond to this opening question for the session because it is so topical. Given what you have just heard from that mum and its impact on her family, and that all the conversation at the moment is about the lack of testing across London and England, what information do you have in terms of how the lack of testing is impacting on the ground in schools? Do you want to come through on that? Who wants to give me a response to that? Stuart?
Stuart Darke (Regional Organiser - Greater London Regional Centre, NASUWT): I do not mind kicking off, Chair. I think what you describe and the letter you have had from your constituent is being replicated across London. The world-beating Test and Trace system or the world-beating testing system is not working, and this is going to be a recurring issue for schools. We do hear from our members where students are being asked to self-isolate or groups or students are being asked to self-isolate, there is not the testing in place. Schools very rapidly went through their ten tests that they were given and of course can order more but that, I think, is going to be a recurring problem, and so you are going to have those pressures in the system and it is
going to lead to other things, which I am sure we will get on to today as well, with how teachers cope with the children being out, groups of children being out of school and groups of children being in school as well.
Jennette Arnold OBE AM (Chair): Thank you. The Deputy Mayor has indicated she wants to come in.
Joanne McCartney (Deputy Mayor for Education and Childcare): Yes, thank you. This is a really important topic and I thank the Panel for looking at this. Last week I held a roundtable with approximately 12 headteachers and also college, and testing was by far the number one priority they were dealing with at the moment. They all talked about lack of testing and difficulties knowing what to do because the messaging was changing rapidly as well. They talked about having staff off awaiting tests or test results, or not even being able to get tests in the first place. They also talked about the fact that, while attendance had been very high in the first week, by the second week attendance was significantly lower as they had many children off because they themselves were ill and could not get tests. I think attendance is falling slightly too.
The Mayor has recently written to Matt Hancock [MP], the Secretary of State for Health, urging him to prioritise testing for schools, early years settings and colleges, and we are pleased that teaching staff now do have priority but I think it is a case of wait and see as to whether that is actually taking place on the ground.
Jennette Arnold OBE AM (Chair): Thank you for that, Deputy Mayor. Rob or Rebecca, anything to add?
Rebecca Montacute (Research and Policy Manager, Sutton Trust): Yes, I would just say that the thing I found very striking in what your constituent spoke about - and I absolutely agree with what has been said in terms of a need for more testing because the more testing that you have, the easier it is to tell that somebody needs to isolate and you can reduce the number of people having to do that - is that no matter what, we are going to end up with students and staff isolating, even having a good testing system. I think your constituent very much pulled out the need for making sure that in the next few months, working from home for those students is possible when and where they need to do that.
The Government have taken some positive steps in terms of providing laptops, first of all for disadvantaged year 10s and now that has been expanded to other year groups. The issue that has been coming out of that rollout is essentially getting the laptops to the kids as quickly as possible, and we have seen that there have been reports on the ground of it taking a very long time for them to get to kids. Our concern at this point is making sure that all of the students that need them - and we think there needs to be a focus on the most disadvantaged young people because they are the least likely to have access to the money to be able to afford that equipment themselves - are able to access schooling remotely when and where they do need to.
Jennette Arnold OBE AM (Chair): Thank you very much. Rob, anything to add?
Rob Coe (Senior Associate, Education Endowment Foundation): No, I do not think I have anything useful to add to what has been said already.
Jennette Arnold OBE AM (Chair): OK. I will go back to Rebecca. A lot of people talk about year 10, but isn’t every year important? I love year 7s, let me put my hand up, and I have my own year 7 so this is really personal, but they have been traumatised. They did not have for their time for their parties to disengage because it hit them when they were planning that. Now they are in big school and they do not have the kit. Rebecca, somebody is picking up the other years. I know the importance of year 10, but if you are not supported from year 7 upwards, what is going to happen?
Rebecca Montacute (Research and Policy Manager, Sutton Trust): I believe the Government have now said that year 3 to year 11 disadvantaged students will be given laptops. I do not think we have enough information yet on how well that rollout has gone and whether or not those laptops are getting to those young people. There is also the issue, obviously, of people in colleges and 16-to-19 education of any sort. There is currently, I think, no specific policy to enable them to have laptops if they need them.
I would also say there has been a great effort by some academy trusts, some businesses and lots of external organisations to try to provide laptops to young people to fill those gaps as well, so there will hopefully be people going above and beyond. Community groups as well, actually, have been putting together old laptops to get them out to schoolkids, so there really has been an effort across society to try to get them out. We do not know enough at the moment about how many young people still need them and that would be something quite useful to know now.
Jennette Arnold OBE AM (Chair): Sorry, Joanne, did you want to add something before I put an additional question to Rebecca?
Joanne McCartney (Deputy Mayor for Education and Childcare): Thank you. Just to add to the issue about the information technology (IT) devices, that also has come through very strongly from our discussions with schools. I think the Resolution Foundation did some research that showed through April to May children from better-off households had 30% more virtual education time than those from poorer backgrounds. You can see that that attainment gap is likely to widen as well. This is an issue going forward.
We had a meeting with the IT leads in each London borough quite early on and one of the concerns as well was not just about the adequacy of the number of devices that were being given out, but the access to wi-fi and data that went with them. When it was rolled out it was extremely welcome but there was no great guidance as to how it should be rolled out. The expectation was, I think, that local authorities would administer the laptops, the data and all the licences and maintenance that went along with it. Actually, what most ended up doing was just passing it straight to the schools to deal with, and a lot of those licences with regards to the data and wi-fi end in the middle of next year. We need more devices, but we also need that data and wi-fi. At my headteachers roundtable last week, one talked about families having to go out to local hotspots such as the local McDonalds in order to use the device that they had.
Jennette Arnold OBE AM (Chair): Yes, because of wi-fi coverage, of course. We are going to come back to you in a moment, Deputy Mayor, about a mayoral action in this area. Can I go back to Rebecca? Rebecca, because of the work that your amazing organisation has done, can you just briefly bring us up to date in terms of what educational inequalities existed in London prior to COVID? We are told about the attainment gap. Was that really narrowing or had that frozen prior to COVID?
Rebecca Montacute (Research and Policy Manager, Sutton Trust): I am afraid I do not have London- specific data but looking at the country as a whole, certainly there had been work over the last decade where the attainment gap had been narrowing. There is some evidence that that narrowing had starter to stall even before the current pandemic. Rob [Coe] might be better placed to speak about this than me, but the EEF have done some work to look at the likely impact on the attainment gap over this period.
In terms of the work that we have done, we certainly know that with students from poorer backgrounds, looking at the schools with the highest proportion of students eligible for free school meals (FSM) - many of which will likely be in London because there are high proportions of students eligible for FSM there - their teachers were less likely to report they had access to adequate devices to learn from home, they were less likely
to be completing the work asked of them, and even when they did complete the work it was of a lower quality than what they had in class. Similar findings have been found across a variety of organisations. The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) has done some work trying to quantify the actual hours in terms of the gap in learning, and they found that in primary schools there has been a gap of 4.5 hours a week, in terms of the amount of learning that people are doing, from the richest to the poorest young people, and that in secondary schools it is about five hours a week. If you amplify that over all of the weeks that these young people have been away from school, you can see that there is a substantial number of hours that they have in fact missed out on because they cannot access that learning in the same way.
We also know that in terms of confidence of parents, we did some polling of parents and found that those who have a higher education qualification themselves were much more likely to say they felt confident supporting their child’s learning from home, whereas less than half of those without that said that they felt confident in doing so. Again, there are very different home environments.
The one bit that we have not touched on in terms of the digital divide, having access to the technology and the internet, is also the issue of space. We did some polling of A-level students who had applied to university this year, people who were in year 13 during lockdown, and we found that 23% of those from working class backgrounds said that they did not have access to a space in which to learn and it was about half that for those from middle class backgrounds. We will all know from working from home ourselves you need to be away from other people and have a quiet working environment or it can be quite difficult, and unfortunately a lot of kids have not had that during this time. Again, it is along socioeconomic lines as to who has that additional space and can afford to have a separate room to work in for each child, say.
Jennette Arnold OBE AM (Chair): That is right. I can see [Dr] Alison [Moore AM] waiting to come in, but can I just go over to Rob and hear from Rob? We talk about boroughs generally and I do not know if you have anything to say about London and the boroughs, Rob, but we do have to make a difference between inner London and outer London, and we do have to be able, within boroughs, to pick up those areas of gross inequalities. Are we doing that well enough? Is this feeding in so that we can get an understanding of the impact of COVID on our most disadvantaged young people? Rob.
Rob Coe (Senior Associate, Education Endowment Foundation): Thanks, Jennette. Again, I am sorry, I do not have London-specific data on this, and to my knowledge there has not been any. I do not know, maybe there has, and people might be able to correct me on that, but that seems an interesting gap because in all sorts of ways, London is quite different from the rest of England. I do think that when policymakers are making decisions about how they address these kinds of issues, it probably is quite important to have local information. That would be interesting to know, if there is that.
What Rebecca [Montacute] said is right, there was a slight narrowing of the gap over the last ten or so years. I do not think we should get too excited about chalking that up as a great success. The gap is still huge in the attainment of the most disadvantaged, particularly the most disadvantaged. Mainly we look at this in terms of FSM eligibility, so any child who has been eligible within the last six years, and that gap is already quite big, but when you look at the sustained disadvantaged youngsters who have been on FSM for the whole of their schooling, for example, then the gap is enormous. It really is huge. The change that was happening in terms of reducing that gap was quite small in relation to the size of the problem.
The idea that COVID has created a problem, I think, is definitely wrong; we had a massive problem before. COVID has definitely not helped, though, and it has probably made it worse. We do not have fabulous evidence about how much worse it has made it. We did this rapid evidence assessment, which is a compromise
between doing a really robust, systematic review where you try to get all the evidence and doing something that is quick and policy relevant. We did that back in April and May [2020], and we found that it looks likely that being away from school will widen that gap, but we were not able to give a very precise estimate. There was not lots of evidence and most of it was from the United States, mostly from the lower end of primary as well, generalising to your beloved year 7s, those precious year 10s and everybody else. That is very problematic because there is not really any evidence about that. Then, of course, COVID is not like the different kinds of school closures that have previously been studied. There are some studies of previous epidemics but not in places like England and not great data either on those, so mostly the evidence comes from things like school summer holiday closure, which obviously is different.
I think it is likely, but what the evidence tells us in this case is what we already knew: that, overall, COVID has an effect on children’s learning but in particular it has a worse effect for those who are already disadvantaged. How much worse and exactly how that plays out, I think it is quite hard to say. There will be some children who actually have coped quite well with this and have continued to learn well, and there will be others whose lives have been completely turned upside down and this will have been very difficult for them and their families. I do not think systematic research can tell us a lot about that picture yet. There is some work ongoing now where we are trying to look at the different strategies that schools have adopted and how that has impacted on the gaps that they are now seeing, and if schools are able to stay open and continue in some kind of normality for the next few weeks and months then I think we will have some quite good data about that, but who knows whether that will continue to be the case.
Jennette Arnold OBE AM (Chair): Thank you. Stuart, it seems to me - and we met this before - that there tends to be national data and we then find ourselves missing London data, and we then have to look to request more data and more information. You and your members, you have perfect research units, do you not, because you have the evidence in front of you? How are your members responding to these issues about children who maybe they were concerned about? Is it too soon to say what the impact has been?
Stuart Darke (Regional Organiser - Greater London Regional Centre, NASUWT): It possibly is too early to say, but what our members have always said and what we have always said, what this shows and what Rebecca [Montacute] has said shows is that the best place for young people is in school. That is the best place for them. Our members want them to be in a safe environment as well when they get into school. That is really important to our members, for the young people’s sake. The remote education that was offered during lockdown very rapidly is not going to replicate what school and being in school provide to young people.
As we move into this next period, if you like, as your constituent described, Chair, and we know it is going to happen, this rolling programme of maybe being in and out of school as well a little bit, there are going to have to be some tough choices by schools as well, some brutal choices, about what to prioritise in terms of remote learning and how that is done, in order to try to not allow inequality to increase in the way perhaps it could. I have not come across any of our members who say they got into education to maintain inequalities in our system. Most of our members join the profession and become teachers because they want to make a difference, they want to really attack this and change life chances for young people.
I think it might be a bit too early to say. They probably are gaining that information at the moment, now that children are back in school and they can look at, “Well, where did we get to?” I know that lots of our members will be doing those assessments with young people to try to work out where they are and what they learnt over lockdown, because there will be a variation. Our members told stories, exactly as Rebecca highlighted, of the families where it was Dad or Mum using the laptop during the day because they were working from home and
then it almost being like a shift system throughout the day because they only had one laptop, they only have one wi-fi. Those sorts of things are really difficult.
Yes, it is a bit too early to say but I think it is going to come through from our members about what children have done and how it has impacted on children, and teachers will do their best then to raise those standards. They are not going to sit by and just say, “We are going to let these inequalities exist”; they will use their professional judgment to work out how to get the children to where they need to be.
Jennette Arnold OBE AM (Chair): Thank you for that. Alison, did you want to come in with any comments from what you have heard?
Dr Alison Moore AM: I could start a long dialogue and get very enthusiastic about this, and I will save some of those questions, if I might, for Joanne [McCartney AM] later, but I had a very particular question about the provision and use of online resources and whether any of you are picking up any specific challenges around students with special educational needs or disabilities (SEND), those with special needs of a variety of sorts, because that is quite a particular area. I wondered if you had picked up or focused on any particular challenges there, and also clearly there is an overlap with families with difficult home circumstances, but perhaps those families from black and minority ethnic (BAME) backgrounds and whether there was anything particular that was emerging aside from the overlap with deprivation and overcrowding that was there.
I would just like to reflect that we are talking a lot about resources for specific learning but Stuart [Darke] talked about the other areas and structure that school provides for children with perhaps more chaotic or challenging backgrounds, and certainly in my experience as a school governor also there is an enrichment level, and a lot of schools with particular cohorts of pupil premium children will use that to build in the enrichment around specific learning tasks so that you are replicating or making up for the sort of input you might not have in every family at home. But particularly I was interested in the SEND aspect because that is a very particular element of online.
Jennette Arnold OBE AM (Chair): Rebecca, any comments to make from a Sutton Trust background? No. Rob?
Rob Coe (Senior Associate, Education Endowment Foundation): Yes. That is a really important point and it is absolutely crucial to keep this front and centre because we are in quite a chaotic situation now, teachers are having to really raise their game in very challenging circumstances, and the stories you hear are both heart-breaking and inspiring about the ways that people are coping. I think when you are in that crisis situation it is easy to forget students who do have specific needs and disabilities that in the normal process, you would cater for well. SEND is such a wide grouping and it means so many different things and for some SEND children this could actually be good for them, but for the majority, I think, and for many kinds of special needs, it is devastating for everyone but it is even more devastating to their wellbeing, educational attainment and general life progress. It is a really good question and one that we absolutely need to keep a focus on. There are specific things that teachers can do but that is a level of detail that is solved at the level of classrooms and schools. From a policy level, it is just really important that we keep asking that question.
Jennette Arnold OBE AM (Chair): Yes. I know that a lot of boroughs have picked up on the needs of children and their families with special educational needs, and also, I represent a borough, Hackney, that has done some work on the challenges for BAME families. As you say, Rob, it is the closure of facilities for that older age group. It is fine to say they can go to nurseries or what have you, but it is the afterschool activities
that were just beginning to establish themselves, and that have closed, that are creating a number of problems in many homes.
I want to go on now and just put a question specifically to Joanne. I know you have been waiting to come in but in anything that you want to say, can you just highlight what the Mayor had done to address inequality prior to COVID? We do not want to hear from you yet about initiatives post-COVID. Anything that you were waiting to say, and then go on to just sharing with us briefly some of the work that I know you and your team had been involved in.
Joanne McCartney (Deputy Mayor for Education and Childcare): Yes, I wanted to just say that we do have some Londonwide data and we do produce a London Education Report, which as you know, Jennette, we now update on a rolling basis so that is accurate. We know that London’s schools do better than elsewhere in the country, and we are really proud of that, but we also know that too many do not leave school with the required standard of education. For example, we know that one quarter of London’s children do not achieve a good level of development at age five, almost one third do not achieve a 9 to 4 grade pass in English and maths at General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE), and one third do not achieve a level 3 qualification beyond 19, so there are still high numbers of children who are not achieving as they should.
Rob [Coe] is quite right, there are big disparities. We know in London that 17% fewer FSM pupils have expected level at Key Stage 2 and that gap is 10.5% at Key Stage 4. We know that there is a 22% gap between the highest and lowest-performing pupils at Key Stage 2 by ethnic group, and we have that sort of data at each level, so that is useful. I know this Panel has looked at that before and looked at inequality. There is no doubt that during the course of the pandemic those disparities will have been exacerbated, and I do think there is some work that needs to be done to look at that. I know later on you are probably going to be asking us about catch-up tuition and so forth, which is going to be a really important part in that.
I think Sarah also had something to say about SEND, and then could I come back?
Jennette Arnold OBE AM (Chair): OK. Sarah, yes, this Committee in fact has urged and has been at the forefront of bringing about such a lot of change, I want that to be said, and then to acknowledge the response that there has been. Sarah, you have been at the heart of that change. Specifically, have you picked up how the impact has been for BAME families with children with SEND diagnoses?
Sarah Wilkins (Senior Manager, Education and Youth Team, Greater London Authority): What I wanted to just kind of pick up on was with respect to the support for children with special educational needs in particular, and this was reported back to us last week at the headteachers roundtable from a lead of a special school in London. They were explaining that very much with respect to the IT support, it is targeted mostly at how you are supporting parents to support that home learning. I think that is a really important distinction, that it is not always children using the online resources themselves but it is about that resource and support for the parents, who are having to do considerable amounts of home learning in circumstances that they never expected, with children who have significant special educational needs. That was one thing, which I think is something worth us all considering and thinking further about how we are continuing to support both parents and students.
The other thing I was just going to refer back to was some of the innovative work that was done while schools were locked down with respect to special schools who were opening up their resources, playground equipment and so on to parents to give some respite and to make sure that there continued to be some normality. There
are some really nice examples where some very specialised equipment was continuing to be used during lockdown to help those parents and families.
Jennette Arnold OBE AM (Chair): Thank you. Have you picked up anything particularly arising from BAME communities?
Sarah Wilkins (Senior Manager, Education and Youth Team, Greater London Authority): It is interesting because we were very concerned with respect to the return to school that it might be disproportionate and that there might be certain groups that did not return to school in September, and there was a lot of work done over that period with respect to making sure that community groups and others were passing on the message we were talking about earlier on, Stuart [Darke], about how important it is for children to be back in school. I think that the feedback and evidence in respect of high initial return-to-school rates was very positive. We were reaching out to specific communities where there was more concern that they may not be returning their children to school. That was a good result with respect to levels of parental confidence.
With respect to specific support for BAME, it seems to be a little more wrapped up with numbers on FSM and deprivation levels, and it goes back to that access to IT. In a way, it is something that is more about that level of household income and the availability not just of IT but also the time that can be spent with children, which goes back to that IFS report that Rebecca [Montacute] mentioned earlier on. There is not anything coming out that strongly at the moment in respect of disparities, but we do know in the past from pre-COVID days that black Caribbean boys, in particular, were not attaining at the same levels as their peers. It goes back to that thinking about how those disadvantages are exacerbated through COVID.
Jennette Arnold OBE AM (Chair): Thank you. Joanne, were there any particular programmes that you wanted to flag up that you have seen the results of, in terms of working with families where the impacts on them are layer after layer of challenge?
Joanne McCartney (Deputy Mayor for Education and Childcare): Yes, I can give a little example about how we have adapted our programmes during the last few months as well. As you know, we have started an early year’s programme, and we found that during the pandemic those early years hubs were crucial in supporting local nurseries and getting those messages out to parents as well. For example, the Barnet Early Years Alliance (BEYA), the early years hub in Barnet, really became the first port of call for any queries related to early years Government guidance, and in Newham the hub there produced videos to give confidence about what they were doing in their settings in Newham to make them COVID-secure and safe for children to return. One of the member nurseries in Wandle Early Years Hub developed a remote key worker system so that all children could continue to be supported by their key worker even when they were not physically in the nursery, and that good practice has been shared.
We are really concerned going forward about the early years sector because I believe around 50% of children are back and for many centres that rely on private fees, that is obviously a really big financial hit. I think there needs to be a lot of work done around the early years sector. To support them, what we have done is we have got an agreement with London Growth Hub and we have partnered with the Early Years Alliance to offer sector-specific business support to nurseries and early years organisation, and the take-up of that has been overwhelming and we are now having to put on some additional workshops to ensure that support goes out.
As you know, the London Curriculum tries to engage students and parents with the city in which they live, and I think the educational industry did an amazing job in adapting those to a London Learning at Home database for teachers and parents. During the first few weeks of lockdown we had over 5,000 unique views, putting it in
one of the top ten most visited pages on the London.gov website. At the moment, we are adapting that even further to map the online offer against our London Curriculum Key Stage 2 and 3 teacher resources to provide virtual alternatives to school trips, because we know that many schools will not be engaging in school trips over the next few months. That is in partnership with cultural institutions in our city.
You talked when you started the meeting, Jennette, about the Panel’s enthusiasm for STEM programmes, and we have been running a series of webinars to help teachers during school closures. They have been hugely popular, and we are going to extend them over the next two terms as well.
You talked about transition earlier and you know our Stepping Stones scheme has had to adapt as well. We have allowed them to have a little more flexibility in how they have that because obviously physically attending a summer school, for many, was not possible. We have held a webinar for those schools coming to the end of their two-year funding, they have shared ideas and we have produced guidance on how to do that in a virtual world. Then that has been passed on to the new cohort of Stepping Stones schools. That is going to be funded by the Violence Reduction Unit over the next couple of years.
Sorry, I could go on, but you may have seen that the Violence Reduction Unit (VRU) has just launched its mentoring and careers advice in London’s Pupil Referral Units as alternative provision to support the most vulnerable children and their parents during this challenging time and give them one-to-one support with a mentor so that they can not only look at their future career paths but refocus on their education.
Then, with the Healthy Schools work, there has been a dedicated briefing every fortnight to all the Healthy Schools on COVID-19 and there is a new section on the Healthy Schools London website signposting to resources to good practice. Then with the Adult Education Budget the Mayor seeks to support those disproportionately affected and so in May [2020] the £11 million Skills for Londoners COVID-19 Response Fund was launched to allow further education (FE) colleges to expand their online provision, adapt courses and build capacity so that they could support learners, particularly those who were at risk of digital exclusion.
There is quite a lot of stuff going on. Our Young Londoners Fund, although many of those projects had to pause for a while, I am really proud that many of them continued to make contact and to engage particularly with their most vulnerable young people. Over the course of the summer you will have seen that we provided another £2.1 million to help an extra 15,000 young Londoners over the summer and into the autumn. I can give you the example of projects such as the Islamic Circles Supplementary School (ICSS) in Newham, which is providing online lessons in maths and English for the next three months for children of refugee families and families affected by domestic violence. In your patch, in Hackney, we provided funding to Gascoyne and Morningside Youth Clubs and they are running a structured weekly afterschool homework club, providing educational and emotional support to 170 young people. Tutors Unlimited are delivering to a small group of 52 primary school pupils to boost their maths and English skills ahead of that transition to secondary school.
There is quite a lot of work we have been doing and we can certainly provide more information about that over the next few weeks to you.
Jennette Arnold OBE AM (Chair): No, I think that sounds really, really good. What we forget sometimes these meetings are about is the opportunity to highlight what is going on and also to keep repeating the information that is out there. Can I just come back to Rebecca? Did you have anything to say, Rebecca, before I ask you a question? Maybe I will put the question to you as well. What I wanted to hear from you is Government action, the key actions that they had taken to address inequality in education prior to COVID and whether those actions need to be ratcheted up or, indeed, have they survived? Do we need a new start, a new
statement from Government to address the inequality we now can assume will be present given COVID’s impact on the lives of children?
Rebecca Montacute (Research and Policy Manager, Sutton Trust): The only bit I just wanted to add in before was to reiterate the concern Joanne [McCartney] had brought up about the early years. That is something we are really concerned about because not only is there the same impact as with schools of young people having missed the time that they should have been in those high-quality providers, but also whether or not those providers will be able to stay open in the same form in the future. We did some additional breakdowns on an Early Years Alliance poll of providers, looking at it by the deprivation level of the area that the provider operates in, and we found that a third of early years providers in deprived areas may have to close - this is their self-reporting, which obviously has its own limitations - within a year, and that 42% of providers in deprived areas are likely to make redundancies.
A part of this comes with the problem that the Government have continued to provide funding for 15 and 30 hours but many providers have to charge a higher rate for their other hours to be able to make up for the amount of funding that they are not getting through those hours normally, and obviously through the time they do not have parents there they are not getting that additional funding. It has really caused quite considerable problems for the early years sector and there is likely to be additional support needed there.
Just coming to your question in terms of the key interventions for disadvantaged young people before the crisis, obviously the most well-known and biggest programme is the pupil premium and that additional funding being given to schools. Rob [Coe], I expect, will have a lot more to say about this, the effective use of that funding and how well that is or is not done at the moment, but that is the big headline policy. We think that absolutely needs to be, at the very least, protected going forward, because clearly there are going to be, probably, because of the economic downturn, a lot more students who are eligible for that funding so more of that funding will need to go into schools, and it is really important that the Government keeps the real-terms amount per student even as the numbers who need it increase.
In terms of whether or not they need to expand programmes going forward, one of the things that both ourselves at the Sutton Trust and the EEF have been very heavily involved in is the National Tutoring Programme (NTP), and that is a really important policy from Government to be able to give some additional funding to schools and ensure that that, together with some existing funds from pupil premium or the wider catch-up funding, is going towards what we know is an evidence-based intervention to help those young people. But really importantly, the NTP will also involve evaluation to get more evidence on which providers are the very best and of highest quality, to help them to expand over time.
At the moment there is a year of funding, essentially, for the NTP, and what we would love to see is a commitment for further years of funding to make sure that we take this opportunity to have built up the system to push the sector towards high-quality tuition, and make sure that schools know who the high-quality providers are, have easy access to them, and that that continues into the longer-term. What we envisage is that over time, the Government will be able to taper that subsidy so that more of the costs over time fall to schools as we go back into a more normal period and we have had a chance to jump-start the tuition market and get schools familiar with those providers. Over time, that could then move to pupil premium, and we would like to see in the longer-term that being a major part of what pupil premium is being spent on, high- quality tuition.
That will be a really important plank, but the NTP alone will not be enough to deal with the scale of the issue that we are talking about in terms of school closures and we do not have enough data yet on the what the
funding situation is like for schools in this current situation. Obviously, we really welcome that the Government has put in, as well as the funding for the NTP, an additional £650 million for schools for catch-up, but schools are also having some quite substantial costs at the moment, things like, if teachers needing to self- isolate, having to get in supply teachers. That is quite a large additional cost. We do not yet have enough information about what that is doing to school budgets and whether or not they are going to need even more funding to be able to make sure that services within schools are not being cut.
Also, we are going to need constant evaluation going forward as to whether or not things like the pupil premium, at the level it was, are going to be enough to make sure that schools are able to access tuition and all the other things that they are going to need over what will be years. The gap, as Rob so well explained earlier, was closing only very slowly to stalling previously, so there is a very big question as to whether or not that was adequate even before this crisis. But certainly, with the aftermath of this crisis, looking over time at what is happening to it, what impact it is having and whether or not more funding might be needed.
Jennette Arnold OBE AM (Chair): Thank you so much for that. That is an absolutely clear outline regarding those Government initiatives. Rob, what do your members say?
Rob Coe (Senior Associate, Education Endowment Foundation): Speaking on behalf of the EEF, I would certainly echo everything that Rebecca [Montacute] said there. There is a lot of work going on involved in trying to support schools to influence policy, and this whole NTP is very much a part of that. It has come out of the Department for Education and the EEF are involved, they are one of the partners in that, as are Sutton Trust. I think that is a really powerful and valuable initiative and it is going to make a lot of difference. It has not come onstream yet, so people are maybe not as aware of it, but that is scheduled to start being active in schools in November [2020] and that is very much part of the catch-up provision.
It seems there are three phases to what we need to think about here. One is crisis management, and I am not quite sure if we are in that yet. We were in it when schools were closed to the majority of pupils. We thought then that September was about catch-up, and September may be about catch-up if we can make things sustainable, but we may be tipping back into crisis management.
Crisis management, I think, is all about the testing that people have already mentioned, particularly testing of teachers and other staff because if you do not have teachers and other staff available, then with the best will in the world you just cannot run schools. That is crucial. It is about confidence. Everyone has to believe in the guidance they are getting, clear guidance, and they have to have appropriate personal protective equipment (PPE) and other safety measures. We have to worry about teachers, other staff and pupils who are at high risk. What are we doing specifically for them? It is not clear to me that we have addressed that particularly well.
People have already talked about issues with remote learning like access to technology, laptops, the internet and so on. Doing remote learning itself, of course, is hard. It is different from teaching in a face-to-face classroom, and the kind of teaching that teachers are having to do now in a socially distanced classroom is also different. Many teachers have a line at the front of the classroom, and they are not allowed to step forward in front of that. The normal interactions that would happen where teachers would chat to students, look at the work they are doing and get a lot of informal feedback and so on about what is happening, a lot of that has been cut off, aside from the fact that people are having to teach with doors and windows open, investing in additional thermal underwear and all sorts of other things like that. People are really raising their game, I think, on this.
Then there is the issue, if I can just mention one more thing, of making sure that nobody falls through the gaps here, and the issue of SEND, I think, is the key one there. When you are dealing with a crisis it is really hard to keep that focus on how everyone is doing here today because you are just trying to get through the day.
That is a whole lot of stuff about crisis management, and that is really just about keeping schools open. Everyone is agreed this is the best thing for young people, to keep schools open and keep them going to school. I do not think there is any disagreement about that.
Then the second phase, this catch-up one, is one where I think the NTP is the main policy lever, which is about individual tutoring, specialised, expert, trained, quality-assured tutoring provision that is available on a targeted basis, so not every young person is going to be able to get this support. Therefore, one of the things that schools need to do is to identify where the needs are most acute for that catch-up provision, which pupils have fallen behind the most or which pupils have struggled the most in other ways. They are the ones that schools will need to identify and support in this way. Of course, there are other forms of targeted support that schools can invoke, as they have done already in the past.
Then the third phase is more sustainable, once those more acute pressures have been relieved and we get back to really the same question that we had before, which is that this disadvantage gap is very persistent, and it is very hard to address. It definitely is the case that statistically the gaps are much smaller in London than they are in many other parts of the country. It is great to hear that nobody is complacent about that, that they are still seen as being too big, and I think that is right, but if, for example, you look at the north east of England where I am today, London looks like a bed of roses. Maybe there is comfort in that, I do not know.
Again, the EEF has clear guidance around this for schools, both COVID-related guidance but also general guidance about planning, and they have this three-tiered model. The main emphasis is on quality teaching every day, so every class, every day, has a teacher who is delivering the highest quality of education. Of course, that is the key. We know that high-quality teaching closes the gap itself because disadvantaged learners are the most sensitive, if you like, to the quality of teaching. One of the features of being socially advantaged is that you can do all right even with average or below average teaching provision. We absolutely need to bring our A game if we are going to try to close this gap and support and reduce the difference between disadvantaged and advantaged youngsters.
Quality teaching. What does that mean in practice? I think that means attending to a whole lot of things about school culture and, in particular, professional learning. We have many, many great, talented and committed teachers in the system and the challenge here, I think, is to support those teachers and challenge them further, so that however good they are, they feel part of their job is to be even better; to create structures where they can support each other as well, collaboration and peer support structures; but in general, just to think quite differently about how we do professional learning because there is a lot of opportunity for improvement, in my view, in the national structures and the culture around that. When we get out of this crisis and when we get past the initial catch-up imperative, then I think our attention should go back to these more persistent problems of how we raise the tide for everyone, in a sense, and by doing that, closing that gap is a consequence.
Jennette Arnold OBE AM (Chair): Thank you. You gave us so much there, Rob, thank you for that. Can I just say to our guests, what happens after these meetings is, we unpick the information we have gathered. We would then be looking to see what came out of that and how we can perhaps write to the Mayor or in the past we have written to the Secretary of State asking questions and urging a continuation of what is going on, as Rebecca [Montacute] highlighted, in terms of the NTP and the situation around the pupil premium.
Stuart, so much has been said about your members. What can you add? Can you come in? There are issues. I am a school governor and a college governor and there are outstanding issues about the effective use of the pupil premium. Do you have anything to add?
Stuart Darke (Regional Organiser - Greater London Regional Centre, NASUWT): I was going to pick up on the additional funding, if you like, of, as Rob [Coe] said, £650 million to schools to spend as they see fit. In my understanding, it is not targeted. It is not hypothecated in that way to be spent. Schools have choices about pupil premium funding as well and how to spend that pupil premium funding.
I would ask whether the fragmentation of education that has occurred over the past number of years aids in a co-ordinated approach across schools or whether that hinders a co-ordinated approach across schools. There are academy trusts. Local authorities maintain schools and are doing lots of wonderful things, but they might be all doing slightly different things. I suppose it is trying to understand, with this additional money, with the additional £650 million, whether schools are making the right choices about how to spend that money and whether it does have an impact.
My understanding as well - and it may be relevant to London - is that there are no additional factors within that for deprivation as well. Normally there are deprivation funding factors but not within this extra £650 million. That might be something that might not lead to the best use of resources or best targeting of resources across schools.
Rob talked about remote education and I mentioned it slightly earlier as well. We seem to be in this situation now where there is going to be a blended learning approach where you will have some children in classrooms and some children at home. If we move into a tier-two or a tier-three lockdown situation in schools, then we might have rotas in secondary schools and children in and out as well, although the guidance talks in one place about two weeks on and two weeks off but then says, “If that does not fit with your curriculum model, it can be a week on and a week off”.
That kind of blended learning approach is time-intensive and workload-intensive for teachers. Before lockdown, before the current pandemic, our members were already telling us that workload was their highest concern. The drivers of workload around marking, around planning, around the use of data in schools and those sorts of things they were telling us about beforehand. I see no reason that it will not change. I am already starting to hear those anecdotal stories. The autumn term is traditionally a long term anyway and it is one when people increasingly as the term goes on become more fatigued, if I put it that way, both pupils and staff. Staff become more fatigued.
If we are going to have remote learning and that is the best we have at the moment, if you see what I mean - we have to have a situation where it is sustainable as well. It cannot be something that is not sustainable over a period of time because it looks like we are going to be in this situation for a period of time. It is important that that is factored in when decisions are made about the use of money, whether that is on the use of supply teachers or employing more teachers in the school in order to adopt this blended learning approach.
The other thing I would say about the £350 million for the catchup NTP is that we feel it does have that potential to make a difference, but it is important, as Rob says, that it is implemented properly and that it is teacher-led and targeted. Teachers will be looking at where pupils are maybe falling behind or maybe need some additional help. That needs to be then factored into what the tutors might be doing with those pupils as
well because, if it is not that kind of approach, it will be mismatched and might not be as effective as it could be.
Jennette Arnold OBE AM (Chair): Thank you. Can somebody tell me quickly where the tutors are to come from? Rob or Rebecca [Montacute], we talked about these. Where are you going to find these tutors?
Rob Coe (Senior Associate, Education Endowment Foundation): There is a massive programme of work to recruit, train and quality-assure tutors in this programme and there is a variety of things. They are mostly not qualified teachers. They might be graduates, for example. There is good evidence to show that when people who are not qualified teachers but who know enough about the content that they are teaching are given particular types of targeted, specific training and support in doing that, with good materials and good support from the systems around them, those can have big impacts on children’s learning as a targeted catch- up measure. We have good evidence to say that. There is a range of different providers that are managing that, recruiting those tutors, training them, quality-assuring them and making that link with the schools so that they can provide that catchup. It is a colossal piece of work. On the one hand you might think, “Well, it has taken till November to do this”, but if you see the amount of work they have had to do, it is a miracle that they will be able to have this in place on that kind of timescale.
Jennette Arnold OBE AM (Chair): Of course, so many parents have had this experience dumped on them. It sounds to me like you are describing a whole army of parents who are already involved in this.
Rob Coe (Senior Associate, Education Endowment Foundation): Some parents may have put themselves forward to work in this way. They get paid to do it. It is not a fortune but for a new graduate, for example, it is an attractive offer. For parents, yes, apparently recruitment for teaching has gone up and one of the reasons people think is that parents have had a bit of a taste of it and realise what a rewarding -- well, it can be.
Jennette Arnold OBE AM (Chair): I will keep quiet on that because we had the opportunity as grandparents to do it. I provided the food and did the dance class and the gym - Tony Arbour [AM] is laughing - and left the rest to my husband. It is one of the most difficult things that we have ever done with our granddaughter and we have a really fabulous relationship. We should salute and applaud all parents who have really, as you said, raised their game and have had to get on and do stuff as well as hold down fulltime jobs and everything else that they have to do.
Joanne, we have some questions for you. Was it specific to anything that we said that you just wanted to add something? Then I want to move on to question 2.
Joanne McCartney (Deputy Mayor for Education and Childcare): Yes, it is just to say that I agree with everything that is been said. One of the issues we have had back very strongly to us is about the unsustainability on school budgets, particularly if staff are away. That supply budget is a concern.
I also understand that initial funding was given to schools at the start of term to make them COVID-safe, but this is going to be a long-term issue. The extra cleaning costs and so forth they have need to be factored in.
There was one other thing I wanted to say or two other things, if I can. Rob [Coe] talked about crisis mode. We need to be aware that food insecurity is also a big issue. We would like the Government to go further and guarantee that preschool meal provision longer term. That is going to be really important. There was quite a campaign to get that happening over the summer and we would like that to carry on. We know from our own
surveys that although there are 196,000 children in London entitled to FSM, there are 400,000 who are experiencing food insecurity. There needs to be a programme on that because we all know that hungry children do not learn.
The other thing I wanted to say is that one of the things we are hearing is that head teachers are really concerned about plans for assessments and exams next summer. From primary, we heard a concern that what primaries need to concentrate on is catching up and supporting their young people. There is a concern around the standard attainment tests (SATs)s next year.
From secondary schools, what we got loud and clear is that there is still a lack of clarity about what the exam syllabus is for next year. For example, one head teacher told us that in their English curriculum last year they undertook the poetry module only to find that that has been cut. That was months of wasted teaching and there is still not proper guidance from the Government or exam boards as to exactly what should be taught for next year. That is making it extremely difficult for our secondary skills.
Jennette Arnold OBE AM (Chair): Thanks for that. You touched on support for families, but do you have anything to say about how the lack of the transport concession is going to impact on disadvantaged families and families heavily under stress? The Mayor, as I understand it, did agree with the Government that this was something that could be reduced. Do you have anything to tell us about that?
Joanne McCartney (Deputy Mayor for Education and Childcare): As you know, Jennette, that was crowbarred into the deal at the last moment. It was either stopping the Tube running or signing that that would happen.
We have had updates at Mayor’s Question Time and in our Transport Committee that this is a real issue and schools are aware it is a real issue. They are really concerned that if free travel is taken away attendance is likely to fall. They are also aware that this will add to the burden on already poor families. With rising job insecurity and unemployment over the next few months, this is going to really add to the burden.
The Mayor is still trying to persuade the Government not to go ahead with taking away free travel. We do know to date, I believe, that there has been about a 30% reduction in use of zip cards already on the buses in the mornings and so that message seems to be getting out that children, if they can, should walk or cycle to school. We also know many will go in cars.
We do not think that there is actually a reason for the Government to proceed with this and it would have more disbenefits than benefits.
Jennette Arnold OBE AM (Chair): Thank you for that. OK. Let us go over to my colleague Assembly Member Devenish. He has a number of questions in our section 2 on the impact of COVID-19 on education inequality. Over to you, Tony.
Tony Devenish AM: Thank you very much, Jennette. I am looking forward to the YouTube video of you parenting your grandchildren. That will be a great hit, I am sure.
Can I start by thanking all the panel today? What you are doing at the moment with young people is even more important than normal. It really is important. I know you have already jumped into the COVID subject, which we are now coming on to, but my question is about the impact of the last seven months in education inequality.
I am going to start, if I can, with each of you on the following question. Maybe we can start with Joanne and then and then move through. My question is: have young people of all ages been affected by school closures in the same way in London or have some ages been impacted more than others and in different ways? If we could start with the Deputy Mayor, please?
Joanne McCartney (Deputy Mayor for Education and Childcare): Yes, there have been differences. We have touched on a lot of this already, Tony. We do know, for example, that better-off families are able to utilise virtual lessons and online learning more. I gave the figure of 30% more during April and May. That is going to have a really big impact.
We also know, for example, with the exam’s fiasco during the start of the summer that that has had an effect on young people. For example, we know from research done by the Prince’s Trust that 29% of young people surveyed said that they feel their future careers have been damaged and 33% feel that everything they worked for has gone to waste. There is a sense among different age groups of different things depending on which point they are at in their education.
Of course, we earlier talked about the effect on particular groups of children. I do not know if you want me to repeat that again. I suspect you do not, but there it is.
Then of course there is not just the educational inequality but there is also the mental health and wellbeing inequalities as well. We know that schools have told us that many children returning are feeling very despondent and very fragile as well. Schools are taking a lot of time at the moment to listen to those individual stories that children are telling them. We have seen a slight increase in reference in referrals to child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS), for example, but we do know that those trigger points might come a little later if children have to go back into lockdown or are away from school. That is another area we need to look at, too.
Tony Devenish AM: Thank you. Rob, did you have anything to add that we have not mentioned earlier, please?
Rob Coe (Senior Associate, Education Endowment Foundation): You are right. A lot of this has been covered already. The question of different ages and the particular groups who are affected by the exam situation is one where perhaps you can point to particular things, but in general, yes, what the pandemic has done is amplified the effects of existing disadvantage in terms of attainment, in terms of wellbeing, in terms of health and in terms of probably many other things as well. It has not created the problem, but it definitely has not helped.
Tony Devenish AM: Thank you. . Rebecca, did you have anything further to add on that, please?
Rebecca Montacute (Research and Policy Manager, Sutton Trust): Yes. On the issue of different age groups, one of the really big issues is that it is going to affect a lot of them very differently because some year groups are going to have several years before they get to important decision points in education and big decision-making exams and will be able to catch up on the learning that they have missed, whereas people who are in this year’s year 11 and this year’s year 13 have missed a considerable amount of learning at what is for them a very important time.
This year’s year 13 I am extremely concerned about both from that point of view and also as well regarding university access, which we have not quite started to get into that much in the public debate. Because of the exam fiasco that happened this year, there has ended up being a really large group of young people who have gone into university this year and universities have ended up taking, in some cases, more people than they would have normally. That coupled with an increase in deferrals - it seems that there has been a slight increase in deferrals and we are trying to figure that issue out at the moment - we are concerned might lead to fewer spots at university for next year’s cohort as universities have limits on space, especially with social distancing. At the same time this cohort has that really big issue around lack of preparation for exams. We are worried about what is going to happen to this year’s year 13 and we think that the political concern needs to start shifting as well to what is going to happen to them. There is the same issue as well for the GCSEs in terms of the ability to prepare for them.
To reiterate the point about the early years as well, there is the potential for that age group, if you do end up getting providers closing or having fewer staff, over time, as people go through it, they could end up being impacted quite considerably by this in the longer term as well.
Tony Devenish AM: Thank you. Stuart, anything to add, please?
Stuart Darke (Regional Organiser - Greater London Regional Centre, NASUWT): No, I do not have anything to add.
Tony Devenish AM: Brilliant. Thank you. Moving on to my next couple of questions, I will ask a couple at once - forgive me - simply because we have covered quite a lot of this.
London, as we all know, is the most diverse region in the country. How have children of different ethnicities been impacted specifically by school closures? Again, only please respond if you have anything we have not already mentioned. Rob, do you want to start, please?
Rob Coe (Senior Associate, Education Endowment Foundation): The truth is that we do not actually know and so it is really important that we do collect data on this, good data that shows us that. As I say, one of the studies that we are hoping to do at the EEF will hopefully give us some of that, assuming we are able to get some of that data.
To the best of my understanding, the main focus has been on social economic disadvantage rather than specifically ethnicity. There is a big intersection there in some groups, but I am not sure that we have a good answer to that question that specifically addresses that.
Tony Devenish AM: Thank you. You actually answered my next question. That was brilliant of you, Rob. Stuart, nothing?
Stuart Darke (Regional Organiser - Greater London Regional Centre, NASUWT): No, nothing to add.
Tony Devenish AM: Great. Deputy Mayor?
Joanne McCartney (Deputy Mayor for Education and Childcare): No, nothing extra. Sarah [Wilkins] talked before about this overlap between deprivation and those groups that typically underperform. We do not have any greater granular data. I agree with everybody that looking at this going forward is certainly something that we should be doing.
Tony Devenish AM: OK. My next question perhaps has been answered. I will have to make a slightly political point there because the question is: what would be the impact of suspending free travel for young people in London? What I guess my colleague Mr Arbour [AM] and I would say is that I am certainly sure that the Department for Transport did check with the Deputy Mayor and this was a social distancing thing rather than the Government just trying to save money. I hear everything you have said. I do not know if, Deputy Mayor, you want to come back because nobody wants young people to suffer. It is about social distancing for everybody on transport.
Joanne McCartney (Deputy Mayor for Education and Childcare): Of course, Tony, as you know, on the school buses, there have been these extra 300-odd buses.
One of the things I am really proud of with our schools is they have listened to Transport for London (TfL) and have staggered their start times. Many now start after the rush hour and so they do not generally have a clash between those who are going to work - and of course we know those numbers are down dramatically - and schools. It is working very well and so I do not see the need to go further and take away the free travel.
Of course, for school children, social distancing is not the same as it would be on a non-school bus. That does alleviate the problem as well.
You and I disagree on that one. This is something that is an investment in our children and young people. We are very proud at the GLA that we have been able to do that over the last number of years and I would be very disappointed if it was taken away by the Government.
Tony Devenish AM: Thank you. Moving on to a question for Stuart specifically, how have parents and guardians been supported to home-school children, please?
Stuart Darke (Regional Organiser - Greater London Regional Centre, NASUWT): Certainly, I know that our members have done an awful lot to try to support parents in aiding young people learning. That has involved contact with parents and making sure that parents are aware of what work is being asked of the young people. I must admit we did have some concerns early on with teachers phoning parents, but that was more to do with teachers using their own devices to phone parents and that has issues around protecting teachers from parents ringing them. There has been a lot of work and our members have been involved in trying to support parents.
As we have already discussed, there has been a variable take-up of that, potentially, and that can depend on all sorts of factors as well, but it is not through lack of wanting to support parents. Schools very rapidly and teachers very rapidly coped with the lockdown and went into a different kind of mode. They did try to provide young people with tasks that would continue to get them to learn and reinforce the learning that perhaps they had already undertaken. Whether you can get all parents engaged in that might be a different matter, but it was certainly not for a lack of trying from teachers.
Tony Devenish AM: Thank you. Then back to you all in terms of my next question, please. Partly, again, this has probably been answered. If you have anything to add to this question, what have been the health and wellbeing impacts of school closures and how have young people’s social skills and mental health been affected? Does anybody have anything specifically to add to that? Rob?
Rob Coe (Senior Associate, Education Endowment Foundation): Yes. It is a shame we did not start with your questions, in a way, and then you could have felt we were more responding to --
Tony Devenish AM: I have to respond to the Chair first. She always has the best questions anyway.
Rob Coe (Senior Associate, Education Endowment Foundation): OK. This is a really important question but one actually where we are very lacking in good evidence. There is a lot of anecdotal evidence about individuals whose mental health and wellbeing has been massively affected or is in a bad state, but across the piece what do we know about that? It is really important that we do know, but we do not have great evidence about it.
It plays to the narrative we have said already, which is that everybody is in agreement that the best thing is to get as many children back into school and in as normal an environment as possible. That is good for learning, that is good for wellbeing and that is good for the economy. There are not downsides, really, other than the requirement to have in place the systems that support that, where we seem to have fallen down a bit. Once they are in school, then teachers and other professionals are well placed to address those kinds of issues. It is much more difficult when they are not.
Tony Devenish AM: I agree 100%. Does anybody else want to add anything to that? Sorry, I have Stuart on my screen. He put his hand up.
Stuart Darke (Regional Organiser - Greater London Regional Centre, NASUWT): Sorry. I was just going to add to that. Since the full return, shall we say, of young people to schools in September, teachers have been putting in place those new routines, looking out for the welfare and the mental health of young people and trying to get them back into those routines of learning. Teachers are well placed to do that and are well skilled in doing that as well. They are using their professional judgement to get children back into those routines and get children into the new routines of washing hands, sanitising and all of those things that are part of the new routines in schools.
Tony Devenish AM: Thank you. Sorry, Rebecca.
Rebecca Montacute (Research and Policy Manager, Sutton Trust): No, that is all right. My bad. Sorry, Stuart. In terms of health, we know that economic downturns can have a considerable impact on people’s health and wellbeing in general. The real concern is that a lot more young people will be living in conditions that will be worse and will have a lot more economic stress at home. We can expect that that, too, will have an impact on how they can do and engage at school. The economic impacts and those impacts then on health will have a knock-on impact into education.
Tony Devenish AM: Thank you. The other questions have been answered that I have, Chair, but if you do not mind, I have one brilliant question from my very clever researcher. Are there any lessons to be learned from lockdown that may prove helpful during the ordinary term times when, hopefully, we get back to that? I am going to put that to the Deputy Mayor to start.
Joanne McCartney (Deputy Mayor for Education and Childcare): Yes, there undoubtedly are. We have heard of some really good practice from our schools about what they are doing. The upskilling of teachers on digital platforms has been given a real boost and that can be incorporated into the classroom in future. We found ourselves with adapting our London Curriculum resources to support parents and teachers that that has
given a real boost to ours and established though even stronger links between our cultural institutions, which we have gathered together to do that.
Also, what it has done for head teachers and teaching staff has brought home the importance of having a healthy workplace as well. There has been continued stress from March onwards. We like to think that teachers have quite a long rest over the summer, but it has certainly not been the case this year. That sustained pressure and sustained stress on head teachers and leadership teams in particular has been like nothing they have experienced before. Having a healthy workplace is really important, which again will improve that quality of teaching and so forth. There is lots we can learn from it.
We will be starting to see as well how we have adapted our mental health provision. What we have done in the GLA certainly has put a lot of effort into supporting, for example, the Thrive London programme and the Good Thinking digital mental health and wellbeing service, which we hope will pay dividends long-term. As other guests have said, we still do not know a lot and we will no doubt have a lot more lessons to learn going forward.
Tony Devenish AM: Thank you. I apologise. I have not asked Sarah to say anything. Did you want to add anything to the discussion, Sarah?
Sarah Wilkins (Senior Manager, Education and Youth, Greater London Authority): No, Joanne has covered off for us on that side.
Tony Devenish AM: Thank you.
Dr Alison Moore AM: I was just going to pick up from one of your mental health and wellbeing questions, if you would not mind, Tony. Rebecca commented on the increasing potential for economic stress, absolutely, and Joanne [McCartney] mentioned food insecurity into that. I would add that issue around the potential for evictions and a whole range of housing issues that may well be affecting more deprived students.
I did want to pick up on whether there is any evidence or a focus on any of our disadvantaged students, particularly those from BAME backgrounds, where deaths from COVID during the spring and early part of the summer may have been disproportionate in those communities, and whether you are picking up any additional mental health and support issues around subgroups of pupils like that. I am happy for anyone who has any comments to answer. I just wanted to pick that up as a particular issue that that appears to be possible with stress and students. I pick up some of that from being a school governor.
Tony Devenish AM: Deputy Mayor, do you want to come back to Alison’s point?
Joanne McCartney (Deputy Mayor for Education and Childcare): Yes, briefly, if I can. It is a really important point to be made because we do know - certainly, I know from my constituency - that certain communities have been particularly affected by COVID and COVID-related fatalities in particular.
If I can give you an example, I have talked about some other mental health work that we are doing. That will be supporting those students who are going back to school and giving those stories about illness and so forth in their families. The Inclusive Schools Programme from the Violence Reduction Unit, which is working in certain schools in those most deprived communities as well, has engaged work on supporting and nurturing schools. As part of that, the provider they are using has been giving a bereavement box of tools and advice and so forth to those schools. That has been given out wider, too.
There is a lot of really good work out there taking place and we want to get that message across that there is support there that can be used. We do know that teachers and schools are availing themselves of that support as well.
Tony Devenish AM: Thank you.
Dr Alison Moore AM: Particularly to our Deputy Mayor, we have talked quite a lot about work that is going on, but the Mayor and you as Deputy Mayor have a strategic role in terms of that pan-London view. I am curious to know what work you are undertaking in a systematic way to understand the effect of school closures on London’s young people.
Joanne McCartney (Deputy Mayor for Education and Childcare): Thank you for that. You are aware that when the COVID pandemic hit during March, very quickly a Strategic Coordinating Group was set up to administer that immediate impact. Under that there was some education work that took place that fed into that.
We have now moved into the transition phase. Under the London Transition Board, which is made up of senior leaders across London, there is an Education Subgroup chaired by [London Borough of Southwark] Councillor Peter John. I am a member of that, as is Sarah [Wilkins]. That group meets fortnightly and has been reporting upwards to the Transition Board. That has focused to date on the challenges of reopening schools and universities. It has also focused on issues regarding the problems with the early-years sector we have talked about. At that group there are those strategic stakeholders who do share what is happening and then that is fed upwards.
It is also going to feed into London’s long-term recovery. Under the London Recovery Board going forward, there is a young person’s mission, A New Deal for Young People. The broad theme is that by 2024 all young people in need will be entitled to a personal mentor and all young Londoners will have access to quality local youth activities. I should say that that is not just a mayoral ambition. It is actually a London-wide ambition. This is led by all London stakeholders working together. That is being fleshed out now.
Over the summer there has been a great deal of consultation on these missions. For example, there were over 68,000 visits on the Talk London website and over 1,000 comments, 70 community conversations were held, and our own Peer Outreach [Workers] Team held specific discussions with young people looking at what they wanted London to provide for them going forward. There is also one recovery mission on digital exclusion, which is having an impact on some of the issues we have talked about today, and one around health as well.
This is all in the mix at the moment and is being worked on. We are all waiting to see at the moment what this second wave brings. We know the Strategic Coordinating Group has been stepped up again and we are quite clear that this Education Subgroup will continue its work.
Dr Alison Moore AM: It is really heartening to know that that work is going on. I will just pick up a couple of elements from that.
You talked about digital exclusion work. Do you have on a strategic pan-London basis an idea of how many young Londoners have been supported through the Government’s £85 million laptop fund? Has London been a strong recipient of money from that to tackle that digital exclusion element?
Joanne McCartney (Deputy Mayor for Education and Childcare): I do not have the exact numbers in front of me. I do not know, Sarah, if you do at all?
Sarah Wilkins (Senior Manager, Education and Youth, Greater London Authority): No, I have not, but I do know that when this started to be distributed earlier in the summer, there were quite a lot of examples where schools had significantly fewer laptops than met their need. As Joanne was talking about earlier, they were in a difficult position about trying to prioritise who would and who would not get laptops.
We are really keen that the laptop scheme is extended and there are more provided in London and definitely provided to more year groups beyond those who are classified as vulnerable by the Government, which is quite a tightly defined group of children and young people at the moment.
Dr Alison Moore AM: Certainly, as we go into some kind of second wave and may well be dealing with blended learning on a longer-term basis, that is absolutely critical. I know from my own council ward that schools have been quite creative. A housing developer next to one school, a good middle-sized family firm, had donated 20 laptops to the school because they had asked what they could do most to help, which was really helpful. That school has a real range of pupils and backgrounds. Thank you. That would be helpful to know because that has been such an important part of learning at the moment.
You also mentioned that wider youth provision. That is really important but of course that free travel with the zip card may be critical in allowing some young people to access that.
Going on to a slightly different thing, you have talked a bit about this, Deputy Mayor, and I do not want to get you repeating things that you have already said, but is there anything else that you would like to say in terms of what action the Mayor is taking to address specifically educational inequalities that there have been and have been widened by school closures?
Joanne McCartney (Deputy Mayor for Education and Childcare): I do not want to repeat what I have said because I gave quite a lot of things, but it is worth talking more generally about the inequalities. We are very clear to many young people that if you cannot see it you cannot be it. It is that phrase that we are all used to now.
Our Getting Ahead London programme, our Stepping into Leadership programme and our Teach London programme are trying to give confidence to particularly black, Asian and minority ethnic teachers to really think about the next step in their careers and get them into leadership positions. We think that by diversifying that leadership team and the teachers we have in our schools; they will provide great role models and will be fantastic for our schools. Within those programmes, we do talk about how to do that quality teaching, how to spot talent and how to raise profiles. Last year we did have modules on unconscious bias as well. There is that whole bit of work that we are doing.
Our London Curriculum resources of course we are very proud of. We think they connect young people to their city, and we are looking at the moment to see how we can diversify those and make them more engaging to certain groups.
There is a lot we have done and there is a lot more we would like to do, but all of us at the moment are concerned about funding. We know that funding is going to be very difficult across the board in the forthcoming year or years, but we are determined that we build that better and that we play our part in doing this.
One of the things that we talked about earlier was the NTP and Sarah might be able to give a little bit, but we would like to help if we can. I do know there have been some early conversations with Team London and its network of volunteers. Sarah, I do not know if you want to add to that.
Sarah Wilkins (Senior Manager, Education and Youth, Greater London Authority): Yes. We are really keen to think about how we can boost the pool of volunteers and others who are offering to provide tutoring support and think about where we have infrastructure that can support with that. Once EEF and the Sutton Trust have identified the key providers in London, we would be keen to talk more about what role we can play and how we can link in with some of our volunteering arms and so on.
One thing I was keen to pick up on with Rebecca [Montacute] is with respect to the end date of the NTP and whether that finishes in July at the end of the academic year or whether the Government has been able to extend that. There are real concerns about setting up an infrastructure that delivers for six months considering the huge amount of work that both Rob [Coe] and Rebecca have said has gone into getting to this point.
Rebecca Montacute (Research and Policy Manager, Sutton Trust): Yes, I can answer that. I would say first as an offer that I was previously working on the NTP and have now gone back full-time to the Sutton Trust, but I can put you in contact with colleagues there who will be able to let you know in October once the organisations in London have been announced. Also, anything that you can do to be able to help get the information about it out to schools as well through existing relationships you have would be really helpful. I can put you in contact with people for that.
In terms of the end date, yes, my understanding is that there is one academic year worth of funding. We would very much like to see that extended and we have just put a submission into the Spending Review to ask for exactly that. At the moment, we do not know what will happen with that. A lot of questions around whether or not there is going to be a one-year response or three from the Government are up in the air a bit at the moment. We are hopeful that it will get additional funding, but we do not know yet.
Dr Alison Moore AM: OK. Just to pick that up and to make a reflection, I guess, and to ask for views, providing that you can resolve the digital exclusion issue, are there opportunities around that digital platform in terms of role modelling and a range of other things to ensure that that could be used positively as an opportunity in terms of ensuring that you are getting good role models out there and perhaps through the NTP a range of faces who are delivering that so that you are seeing that “see it to be it” angle very much. Do you have any comments about ensuring that no pupils are left behind in that process?
Jennette Arnold OBE AM (Chair): We have heard a lot of absolutely valuable contributions about that. I wonder, Alison, if we can now go to Tony Arbour and pick up the questions that I asked you to ask, Mr Arbour?
Tony Arbour AM: Thank you for that, Chair. I am pretty sure that we have covered all of the questions I have been asked to deal with and I do not want duplication.
One thing that has not been mentioned during this discussion has been the written submissions that we had. You will recall we had written submissions from London Councils and we had a written submission from Oasis. The one universal observation both from the witnesses we have had in person and from the submissions we had relates to digital exclusion. Clearly, that appears to me to be something we should be concentrating whatever resources we may have access to in dealing with.
In relation to that, it was noticeable during the lockdown before children went back to school this term that many schools offered different kinds of provision at home. I guess this is one for Rebecca because I am sure that the Sutton Trust has done work on this. Is there any pattern between the kinds of schools that offered the most programmed work at home and the schools that did not? Even in my boroughs - and I have two very affluent boroughs as well as Hounslow, which has a deprived area - there has been enormous variation. I wonder if there is any way we can account for that. That is for Rebecca, really.
Rebecca Montacute (Research and Policy Manager, Sutton Trust): Yes, absolutely. I mentioned earlier that we did polling of teachers to ask them about what they were providing during lockdown. There were big differences both between private and state schools and then within the state schools by the level of deprivation that the school catered for.
Sixty per cent of private schools and 37% of state schools in the most affluent areas had an online platform at the very beginning of lockdown that they could use to receive work. That was not something that they set up for this response. They already had it ready to be able to use and then made use of it during the lockdown. Only 23% of the most deprived schools had that same kind of platform. Part of it was about what the schools already were making use of in terms of digital learning.
The other question as well was around the training the teachers had had. One of the things that I have not mentioned previously but is really important going forward is that teachers are given support and training to be able to deliver that content online. Again, there are very similar patterns. Those from private schools felt much more able to provide online lessons and those in the most affluent state schools felt more able to than those in the least. There very much were differences in readiness between different types of schools.
People were not building up for this situation because people did not think that this was going to be something that would happen. There are questions about whether or not maybe people should have thought about that a bit more, but certainly things they were doing already in terms of provision for students ended up helping them in ways that seemed quite obvious but perhaps had not been thought about beforehand.
Tony Arbour AM: OK. I see Stuart has his hand up.
Stuart Darke (Regional Organiser - Greater London Regional Centre, NASUWT): I was just going to add that, from our members’ perspective, from teachers’ perspective, it is not possible I suppose to recreate the classroom environment online. It is not possible just to do what you would do in a classroom online. That is very difficult to recreate.
You are going to get a range of things as well. Some people, where it is appropriate and where it is it is needed and where teachers make a professional judgement, might livestream something and they might do it in that fashion, but there are other things that do not lend themselves necessarily to livestreaming and can be done through online platforms.
Rebecca [Montacute] summed it up right and I would reiterate around that training. There is that training need for teachers around it. If this is going to be something that is in place for a period of time, for teachers to be able to use those online platforms like Show My Homework, Google Classroom and those sorts of platforms that are available to schools, they are going to need the training in order to use them to the best advantage for education.
Tony Arbour AM: Before I come to Sarah, can I ask you about the training and who should be providing this training? We did have a submission, as you saw, from Oasis and I know that other academy chains in London - and we hear about the outstanding examples that there are - provided a great deal of this work at home.
Is there some difference between the ethos of academies and other schools in the state sector that meant that they were able to provide this? I think that is one for you, Stuart, really.
Stuart Darke (Regional Organiser - Greater London Regional Centre, NASUWT): No, there is not a difference. You will have examples of maintained schools providing online learning in the same way that academies provided that online learning. Think is not a difference in ethos there.
In terms of who provides the training, I suppose my answer as a trade union official is that the employer should provide the training. I mentioned fragmentation earlier as well. With fragmentation, you will get academy trusts and you will get maintained schools that have good practice. The issue is then about how to share that good practice across all of those schools to make sure that every child benefits from it. Fragmentation does not necessarily allow that to happen. Having three Regional Schools Commissioners in London does not necessarily allow that to happen. It is those sorts of things.
Yes, there should be training. Who should provide it? The employer. Is there a difference in ethos? No. I suspect that the results of Rebecca’s survey were a mixture of maintained schools, academy schools and independent schools.
Tony Arbour AM: Sarah?
Sarah Wilkins (Senior Manager, Education and Youth, Greater London Authority): One of the things that we are hearing from schools is about the difference between primary schools and secondary schools with respect to online learning. Secondary schools on the whole had more resources and their students have access to more resources than primary school children and their teachers have more experience of doing more of a hybrid of flick learning and were more experienced in doing some of these things when they were recording and livestreaming in the past, but for primary schools much less so.
The other thing is a really good point about sharing that learning. Schools are getting on with it. They are doing things and they are trying different things. One thing we heard about last week was about a school that had set up at quite an economical cost a way of livestreaming using Teams and equipping teachers with mics. That works quite well when you have some of your class self-isolating and are able to just log on and watch those sessions that were being delivered in the classroom in real time. There definitely is considerable emerging practice. The challenge is to make sure that that is shared in an equitable way, Stuart. We can also learn from independent schools to some degree on this as well.
Tony Arbour AM: We have heard of an organisation called Invicta based in Kent, which provides a huge range of online facilities of the kind you have talked about, the sorts of things that my local independent schools have been offering to state schools. It is provided free by the organisation Invicta.
Is there any advice given to schools - and I am not sure who it would come from - to say that this is a good thing for them to subscribe to or is there some kind of insularity that says, “We know best”? Maybe that is too provocative a question, Chair.
I hope you will find my changed nuance helpful, Chair, as far as this is concerned. Probably I will finish my section, therefore.
Jennette Arnold OBE AM (Chair): Thank you, Tony. No, I loved your questions. Thank you for bringing in the submissions because we had some really informative submissions.
Let me just see if anybody has a quick answer to this. Steve Chalke, founder of Oasis Academies, mentioned exams. We are here and so let us see if we can get a response and your thoughts. Steve said:
“There needs to be a complete rethink of the examination system for the forthcoming year. Students will not be caught up in time to sit exams as they are currently planned.”
If I can add, if you think of what my constituent mother was saying in terms of the loss of school time for her 12-year-old, it just seems that we are asking a lot, far more than is doable for our young people. Any thoughts on this? Rob, any thoughts?
Rob Coe (Senior Associate, Education Endowment Foundation): Yes, thanks, Chair. This issue was raised by a couple of people earlier and it seems to me this is one where we could be perhaps writing to the Secretary of State with a very clear set of requirements. It is going to be controversial because Ministers in the Department [for Education] seem to be very keen on the idea that exams should go ahead.
There are pros and cons of trying to do that. Certainly in normal circumstances, if we are concerned, for example, about the impact on disadvantaged youngsters, there is quite a lot of evidence that shows that exams are the fairest way. Exams do not undo other existing inequalities and so they are not a miracle cure for creating a level playing field. If you come from a housing situation and a school situation that is more challenging and more disadvantaged, having to sit the same exam does not address that. We need to worry about all those issues, but the evidence is that exams are less amplifying of those disadvantages than other assessment systems like teacher assessment, for example. That is not necessarily a reason to prefer them if there are other good reasons for wanting to do other things. There is an argument to be had there and a debate, definitely.
In the context of England, this is all coloured massively by the accountability system. That is one of the reasons why Ministers prefer exams and one of the reasons why over recent years the coursework elements that we had in many qualifications, particularly at GCSE, for example, have either diminished or disappeared from that landscape of examinations. The main driver for that is this accountability pressure and the idea that if you have terminal exams that are well standardised, it is easier to manage.
These are bigger political questions. We might think those are the wrong drivers and the wrong answers, but in a sense, those are not our decisions to make. There is a case for the Minister’s decision that we should have exams. Let us go with that. We might not think it is the best outcome.
What we absolutely need is two things. One is really clear guidance about this as soon as possible. They are sitting on the fence on this. They do not know what they are doing. They have let it be known that their preference is for exams, but they have not told schools, teachers, parents, and students what is going to happen. That is an outrageous dereliction of their responsibility. They need to be clear, “This is what we are going to do, and this is how it is going to work”. By the way, that should not just be, “We prefer exams and we would like to do them if possible”. There should be really clear guidance about how that is going to happen in a range of different scenarios.
One of the features of this situation is there is so much unpredictability. It could be that exams can go ahead as normal even though the teaching has been disrupted this year. It could be that the teaching this year is not massively disrupted. That is even possible. It could be that virtually no teaching happens and we are back to how we were in March, April, and May when a handful, if that, of children were in school. All of those scenarios are possible, and they should all be planned for. This feels like such a ridiculous thing to ask for, the idea that people should think ahead. Here is a range of plausible scenarios. We should have preparation in place in case those things happen. That needs to come from Ministers and from the Department and it needs to come urgently because time is ticking away. Teachers, students, and parents need to know what the situation is there.
The other thing they need to do is give really clear guidance about what the accountability processes will be because, again, they just have not said. Last year we were told reasonably soon that there will not be league tables and there will not be accountability. How could they not make that decision? Again, anything else would just be absurd, but they have not made that decision and they just need to.
It is those two things: what is going to happen and in particular what is going to happen about accountability.
Jennette Arnold OBE AM (Chair): I see a letter coming on, Rob, absolutely. I am going to be signing that letter in a few days’ time. I see Rebecca. Rebecca, please add to that or give us a different steer.
Rebecca Montacute (Research and Policy Manager, Sutton Trust): In general, I would agree with everything that Rob just said.
The only thing I would add as well is that there is also a question for what happens to young people in their next steps, making decisions based on exam grades and how they should treat them. If exams happen next year, then there is not going to be a chance for people to be able to catch up, especially those from the most disadvantaged backgrounds. That comes to post-16 providers making decisions about GCSE results, universities, apprenticeships and all of that further education space and employers being educated about the impact for people from various social economic backgrounds and then taking that into account in their decision-making. A lot of universities already have very good practice of doing contextual admissions. We would make the case to them at this point that they should be really taking it extremely seriously at the moment and redoubling their efforts to make sure they are looking at pupils contextually, which should include taking into account the likely impact of the pandemic.
It is the same for employers as well. We would really encourage them to think about the impact that this has had on young people’s grades and make decisions accordingly.
Jennette Arnold OBE AM (Chair): Thank you. That is excellent. Stuart, what do you think your members are going to be saying? Can they get their pupils set and ready for exams as programmed?
Stuart Darke (Regional Organiser - Greater London Regional Centre, NASUWT): What is needed is what Rob described: a degree of clarity about what is going to happen. I suppose the teachers will do their best according to the systems that they operate within, but not knowing what might happen, as Rob describes, come March next year, a few months before exams, is the situation we were in this year as well. We need a degree of clarity with the ability to make an impact, knowing what is going on. Without knowing and without knowing the plan in England for examinations, teachers might be shooting in the dark, so to speak. They will do what they can to equip young people but, if they know what the plan is around exams next year, they can
perform with a degree of certainty as to what they are aiming for and what they are getting young people to aim for.
Jennette Arnold OBE AM (Chair): Thank you very much. That seemed to me to be such a strong point that came out at the end of that meeting and I am sure I will get my colleagues’ support to put pen to paper with another “Dear Mr Williamson” letter to say, “Please do better or, indeed, give us some clarity”.
Panel members, can I thank you so much for your rich contributions, which have been rich and so informative? It really felt that we had a great exchange and a conversation, which is what this Panel has been able to do in the past and we have done today. Please feel free, if you think that you were not clear enough or you want to add more to anything you have said, to send an email to Daniel [Tattersall, Senior Policy Advisor, GLA]. Do continue the great work that you are doing, and we will continue what we have here.
Thank you to our Deputy Mayor. I have said it publicly before. Thank goodness that this position was created and that you really stepped into this vacuum. You have allowed the GLA and the mayoralty to make a valuable contribution. I will be writing to you, though, about disabled young people and how their contribution is being included in this new deal for young people, especially around the London Transition Board, given that there are some concerns about how disabled people are able to feed into the top table. Especially when the Royal Society of Birds is at the top table, it seems strange to me that we do not have disabled people there. I will be writing to you a note to see how they feed into the work that is going on when you talked about the new deal for young people, which we had not heard of before.
Joanne McCartney (Deputy Mayor for Education and Childcare): That is a point well-made and we are very keen on being as inclusive as possible and listening to the voices of young people in particular.
Jennette Arnold OBE AM (Chair): Yes. Thank you so much. We have a few more formal things to do, guests. I do not know what you are going to do, spend the rest of your day going back into pyjamas or into leisure outfits or what have you, but enjoy and thank you very much.
Rob Coe (Senior Associate, Education Endowment Foundation): Thank you so much. It has been really interesting. Good luck with your work.
Rebecca Montacute (Research and Policy Manager, Sutton Trust): Thank you very much.