Date: 11/06/21
By Alan Hardie, CEO at NCEAT.

Last week, Sir Kevan Collins, the highly respected Education Recovery Commissioner, resigned following the failure of the government to implement most of his recommendations on how schools can ‘catch up’ over the next few years. Sir Kevan’s very public resignation raises many questions and the key question is how much do the government value our children?

Sir Kevan’s report recommended spending around £15 billion to support catch up, while the government has actually committed £1.5 billion. Both figures are huge sums, but to put an individual perspective on this, £1.5 billion works out at £50 per pupil, meaning that what Sir Kevan asked for was £500 per pupil.

The school system in the USA gets a lot of criticism for a lack of investment, but President Biden has committed an extra £1,500 per pupil for Covid-19 catch-up, while the Dutch government has allocated £2,000 per pupil. All of this makes our Government’s investment seem poor by comparison, especially where it has managed to spend £37 billion over the last two years on the Test and Trace system, which a recent House of Commons Public Accounts Committee Report described as having an “absurd cost and failures”.

As I’ve said previously, I don’t take a party political view and I have some sympathy for those in Government making difficult decisions. However, I will speak out against injustice and when it comes to investment in education, it does seem that those controlling the funding, in the words of Oscar Wilde, “know the price of everything and the value of nothing”.

The Institute of Fiscal Studies has reported that the educational impact of the Covid-19 pandemic in Britain could lead to our pupils losing 30-40% of future lifetime earnings. Nationally this adds up to lost earnings of £350 billion and this would mean over £100 billion less tax revenue to spend on public services and pay off national debt. Others have predicted that the total impact of pupils failing to catch up could be the loss of over £1 trillion to the UK economy in future decades. As usual, the greatest impacts will be on children and areas with the highest level of disadvantage.

When faced with figures like these, it makes far more sense to me to see the £15 billion as an investment in our children’s futures rather than see it as a cost. The actions the government takes to support pupils catching up on their education will be judged by future generations as how much the government values our children, particularly those who are disadvantaged.