I suspect a lot of this money will go to tutoring companies and cover their 'costs' - they might be the biggest beneficiaries in this.
I think the issue is that people struggle to differentiate between the disadvantage all children have experienced in their education, compared to the norm of having the 4 months in school they will have all missed, and the differing level of disadvantage that children who are already disadvantaged experience.
So, the typical child might theoretically be 3 months (made up number) after Covid. The disadvantaged child might now be 8 months behind where they started from (which was already behind)
Parents get agitated about targetted help, because they worry that their own individual non-disadvantaged category child isn't where they would have been. Understandably, they would like the government and schools to be planning for bridging the gap their own child has experienced due to covid. They forget that others have slipped even further behind and so essentially are more needy.
The government in my view needs to implement 2 plans and make them clear. There is the plan for the disadvantaged group who absilotley need input to reduce the scarily-widening group. However they need another, different scheme too, so that ALL children who have lost out due to Covid have a chance to catch up a bit and for parents to feel the issue is recognised and addressed, rather than from now on, all children are just expected to be 5 months behind a usual group of school children. Quite what that plan could be or should be is difficult to say, when you have to think about the realities of who will deliver any plan. Some kind of summer tick-over work is needed so children keep reading and writing and doing some numeracy to stop further slipping back. Tricky though, because not all families will want to engage or be able to.
In reality, I suspect that many students will always be just that bit behind. Some families will have worked hard now and continue working hard to plug the gap and they will manage to eradicate it. Schools will work hard on catch-up and eradicate a bit of the gap for most children. They probably, without parental input won't be able to get rid of all the loss that has happened.
Some of this will come down to how much normal, non-disadvantaged families who don't qualify for the extra help are willing and able to engage, in the same way it has during lockdown. Some parents, even when working full time and facing difficulties have still prioritised schooling and learning. They might have lacked time and any kind of teaching knowledge, but they have made their priority in the bit of time they do have, finding stuff for children to do and making sure the children have done what school set. Without doubt it's been hard work and not always pleasant. Many others have been less fastidious and in the face of the difficulties of working full time, child resistance and lack of prior knowledge, gone with the flow a bit more and accepted little will be achieved in this period. It is totally understandable why people have gone for option 2 - option 1 was just too hard or felt too hard for lots of families, and perhaps it is beyond what most could actually do. But those who struggled on with option 1 and made it their priority, even in the face of extreme difficulty, will find their children face a smaller gap. It's always the reality that parental engagement makes all the difference.
The disadvantaged who will qualify for the tutoring absolutely need it. Their level of disadvantage far exceeds 4 months not in school. For the rest, those whose parents fully enagage D on a persistent basis even when it was bloody hard and meant using their precious free time after doing a full time job, to think about how to keep their children's education going, will be the ones who experience less disadvantage.
I'd say, schools should be providing really precise guidance for the summer, but it will be down to parents to really make it happen and to ferret out a way forward if the schools are lacking. For those who are really worried, even if working, the summer is a chance to do something about it. People might feel they shouldn't have to and schools should plug the gap. The reality is schools simply won't be able to do that from a distance for a further 6 weeks, so it does come down to parents and perhaps now is the time to be thinking about the summer and a bit of a plan.......not a tempting thought in any sense...but some parents will be doing it right now.