The Government’s Social Mobility Action Plan was launched last December, with various initiatives aimed at improving literacy and numeracy standards in the early years as a means of reducing the disadvantage gap. In July a number of extra funds were announced, taking the total committed funding to £72 million
We have unpicked these plans, which have several ambitions, each with underpinning challenges, and indicated how much money has been allotted to each.
As we have seen with the Workforce Strategy, when you strip out what is genuinely new, the resulting policy paper can get a little thin. For example, £12 million for literacy hubs in the North and £5 million to trial parenting interventions were announced before the Social Mobility Action Plan was published.
The Government’s social mobility aims are divided into several ambitions.
AMBITION 1 is to close the word gap in the early years. The Government has identified three associated challenges here:
Challenge 1: To ensure more children can experience a language-rich environment.
Overall, £20 million has been announced to provide practical tools and advice to parents (the most recent announcement on this was July).
This breaks down into:
£6.5 million
For parents who need help teaching their children reading, writing and language skills will get practical help such as home visits and online tools
£5 million
For an Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) trial for projects that support parents to help their children learn new words
£8.5 million
For help for local authorities to make improvements in early learning for local communities.
Also, the Government has announced it wants to hear new ideas from a coalition including the National Literacy Trust and Public Health England to encourage more parents to read and learn new words with their children.
The coalition will hold a summit this autumn to come up with practical ideas to boost parents’ confidence with supporting their child’s language and literacy from an early age. This could include awareness-raising campaigns, like the ‘5-a-day’ public health campaign. The DfE says more information will be available ‘in due course’.
Challenge 2: To improve take-up of quality provision in disadvantaged areas:
£50 million
for more quality school-based nursery provision for disadvantaged children.
Challenge 3: Improve the quality of early years provision:
£26 million
for a network of school-led English Hubs to share excellence with a focus on Reception, targeted at areas of weak early language and literacy.
£20 million
for early years practitioners in pre-Reception nursery settings to support early language and numeracy.
AMBITION 2 is closing the attainment gap in school outcomes between disadvantaged young people and their peers.
To this end the Government has announced:
A new Centre of Excellence for Literacy Teaching that will set up a national network of 35 English Hubs across the country (see Challenge 3, left)
£435,000
for new phonics and reading partnerships set up from April 2018. Another 20 phonics and reading roadshows will also be run across the country.
£5.7 million
for a Strategic School Improvement Fund for initiatives that boost literacy and numeracy skills in early years and primary education (not available to PVI settings).
Opportunity areas
£72 million over three years (2017-18 to 2019-20)
Other Government initiatives to support the alleviation of deprivation include the ‘opportunity areas’, where early years providers, schools, colleges, universities, businesses, charities and local authorities work together on targeted programmes to try to improve children’s outcomes. Nine of these areas have an early years focus or are running early years projects, e.g. self-regulation and resilience in Ipswich.
