Some disturbing numbers right at the start of the NAO report on education and the early pandemic:

- 15% reduction in referrals to children's social care services April-August
- 30% time gap between high income/ low income pupils on home learning
- 36% growth in attainment gap
NAO's key findings

1) Says DfE did not develop an overarching plan to deal with the crisis til end of June. The Dept had no pre-existing plan to deal with a major emergency of national school closures, only localised ones, like flooding.
2) Schools risk being left severely out of pocket by the crisis. NAO says as of January DfE had paid or intended to pay schools £133m (or only 73%) of the £181m they had claimed for their Covid costs.
DfE gave funding for 3 things: school meals, Easter/summer openings and cleaning. Within the £181m total, schools made £42m of claims outside those categories, eg for PPE, home IT and extra staff. “The Department didn’t reimburse schools for any of these other claims.”
3) Communications: anyone who has covered schools over the past year knows how frustrated teachers have been by the sheer volume of communications from DfE and when it drops, something NAO has picked up on: “schools were not always clear what changes it had made.”
4) IT: DfE concluded that providing 600k laptops/100k routers for all vulnerable children wasn’t possible due to numbers involved. So they targeted those with social worker etc only. It paid Computacenter £70m for the contract. Most didn’t reach schools til June.
As a result "many children may not have been able to access remote learning until well into the second half of the summer term."

That said NAO does say that DfE research does say "the UK delivered considerably more equipment than any of the other 19 European countries examined."
5) Internet access: NAO says DfE trialled 3 schemes w/ "varying degrees of success"

a) 10,000 wifi hotspot vouchers for kids w/o internet at home: "V few of the vouchers were activated"
b) "zero rating" certain educational websites so data wasn't spent. Only happened to 2 sites.
c) Much more success though with mobile data. 10 operators had signed up to a scheme to provide free data as of Jan 2021.
6) NAO expresses concern that the tutoring catch up programme isn't reaching as many disadvantaged pupils as it should: "Of the 125,200 children allocated a tutoring
place, 41,100 had started to receive tuition, of whom 44% were eligible for pupil premium..."
"...This raises questions over the extent to which the scheme will reach the most disadvantaged children."

Added to that NAO has concern that some schools won't be able to meet 25% of the costs they're expected to provide.

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More from @lewis_goodall

17 Mar
Exciting night ahead in Dutch politics 👇👇
Thoughts and prayers with Dutch election night gfx teams Image
Mark Rutte looks set for a fourth term as Prime Minister in the Netherlands-his VVD looks set to gain several seats. Liberal, pro-EU D66 a big winner gaining 8 seats. Wilders’ Far Right PVV fall back, as do the Greens. The once powerful Dutch Labour still enfeebled and stagnant.
Read 9 tweets
17 Mar
This is the letter from NHS senior leadership outlining vaccine changes- “supply constraint means vaccination centres and community pharmacy led local vaccination services should close infilled books from week commencing 29th March”
“The govt’s Vaccines Task Force have now notified us that there will be a significant reduction in weekly supply from manufacturers in the week commencing March 29th- meaning volumes for first doses will be significantly constrained.”

Predicted this will continue for 4 weeks.
This has a very different emphasis to that of Matt Hancock's in his briefing- who is instead saying he wants to vaccinate all vulnerable people in the over 50 group before moving on to lower age groups.
Read 6 tweets
17 Mar
17 minutes in and we haven’t heard from a woman yet. #pmqs
20 minutes...
Was 21 minutes into PMQs before a woman was heard from (Caroline Lucas)- despite the debate being dominated about women’s rights, talk of what “women think” and so on
Read 5 tweets
17 Mar
Keir Starmer says the death of Sarah Everard “must be a turning point in how we tackle violence against women and girls”- compares it to the “watershed moments” of Stephen Lawrence and James Bulger. #pmqs
Boris Johnson says a we need “a cultural change to redress the balance”.

Says he’s open to Labour proposals on the issue
PM: “I think it would have been a good thing if last night the whole House had voted for tougher sentences for those who commit sexual and violent offences and stop them being released early.”
Read 5 tweets
16 Mar
Wow. Huge news. First by-election of the Parliament, right in the centre of the “red wall” where so much of the shifts of our political geography are taking place. Tories have targeted it for the last two cycles, likely thwarted last time by v high Brexit Party vote.
Has been Labour in one form or another since 1945. A test as to how permanent the 2019 Tory coalition might have been and indeed whether the electoral map can be further expanded now the BXP is largely off the scene (though Reform will presumably contest)
Big test for Starmer just at a point where the polling Gods are no longer with him. If he were to lose it atop of a poor locals result it would be massively damaging for his authority and his pitch as the electable figure who would be taken seriously by traditional Lab voters.
Read 5 tweets
15 Mar
Barrister Harriet Johnson tells @Maitlis: “I and others in my profession are seeing a growing body of evidence that police are institutionally misogynist. I see rape victims blamed, belittled, ridiculed and ignored by officers who are supposed to be supporting them.” #Newsnight
“I see police officers who just don’t believe women until the man who has raped them does it again and suddenly their evidence is not only creditable but vital.”
Ngozi Fulani, CEO Sistah Space: “Missing from the misogyny is racism...it seems that black women who go through domestic abuse, who are missing or who are murdered we don’t get the same response, we don’t get the outcry, we don’t get the concern, the public coming out for us.”
Read 4 tweets

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