Isabel Hardman

There are just days until all pupils return to English schools, and Conservative MPs are becoming increasingly concerned about what state many of these students will be in when they arrive back in the classroom after the best part of a year trying to learn from home. At today's Education Questions in the House of Commons, a number of backbenchers pressed Education Secretary Gavin Williamson on the work the government is doing to get the most disadvantaged children back up to speed. Both Jack Brereton and Julian Sturdy had tabled questions asking 'what support his department is providing to help children catch up on lost learning during the Covid-19 outbreak'. Williamson's response was to point to the £1.

Helping children catch up on the best part of a year out of the classroom is one of the biggest tasks facing the government. On Wednesday, Gavin Williamson announced an extra £400 million in funding which schools can use to run summer programmes and other catch-up projects. That's on top of £300 million allocated last month and £1 billion announced last year. Ministers hope that their Recovery Premium will help schools support particularly disadvantaged pupils, who have fallen further behind than their peers as a result of having to do remote learning for so long. But they are also under pressure to show that they are thinking about the long-term, as even the best summer schools will not repair the damage to learning, confidence and other skills caused by the pandemic.

Most of the Conservative MPs who responded to Robert Jenrick's statement this afternoon about an extra £3.5 billion to help with the cladding crisis sounded relieved that the government is finally doing something. But if ministers think that the response in the Chamber means they can relax, they are in for a bit of a shock. The two most active Conservative MPs on this issue are Stephen McPartland and Royston Smith, and neither spoke in the Commons after the announcement. But both have been critical elsewhere. McPartland called the policy – which will only offer loans to leaseholders in blocks between 11 and 18 metres high – a 'betrayal' and accused the government of 'shocking incompetence'. He added: 'It is clear the Prime Minister has to step in'.

Labour is demanding that Matt Hancock apologise to NHS workers for a 'disgraceful attack' on the NHS. In a letter to the Health Secretary, the party's deputy leader Angela Rayner says Hancock must distance himself from a claim that 'there is nothing special about the NHS, neither during this pandemic nor at any other time'. She also writes that 'if you are committed to the protection of our NHS you must take action immediately to assure the NHS and the British people' that he doesn't think 'we should not be grateful for the NHS or thank the NHS and its staff for their work during this pandemic'. This sounds serious, like the kind of view any health secretary might want to run a mile from.

It has taken the Conservatives an entire decade to recover from their last attempt to legislate for a reorganisation of the NHS. Now, they're proposing to unpick some of what's left of that Health and Social Care Act.  Details of a Health and Care White Paper leaked to the excellent Andy Cowper at Health Policy Insight last week revealed that ministers want to grab more control of the health service overall, as well as individual foundation trusts and matters such as water fluoridation. The Health Secretary will become significantly more powerful. Some of this forthcoming legislation contains changes NHS England has long wanted and been expecting, such as abolishing Andrew Lansley's clinical commissioning groups and replacing them with integrated care systems.

Wednesday's very upbeat Downing Street coronavirus briefing underlined the optimism that Boris Johnson feels about the way the Covid crisis could work out for him. The Prime Minister was celebrating the UK passing the ten million mark for the number of people who have received their first dose of the vaccine, and thanked the NHS for the programme, which he described as 'the most colossal in the history of our National Health Service'. He also very pointedly thanked the Vaccine Taskforce, which the Prime Minister sees as another vindication of his approach to the pandemic. For Johnson, the first part of the coronavirus crisis was bruising and the government made a series of mistakes which were obvious at the time and even more so with hindsight.