Sir Kevan Collins, former government advisor on education recovery, spoke this week to MPs on the education select committee. Sir Kevan was asked about his former role, and his thoughts on the government’s ‘catch-up’ plan.
On his role, Sir Kevan said that he had been ‘given a very ambitious but very exciting exam question by the Prime Minister, which was to recover every child in this Parliament.’ However, despite examining the evidence and approaches, Sir Kevan said that the proposals that came forward were not enough to deliver the recovery needed. In particular, he was disappointed about the lack of arrangements for increasing time children spend in school, to ‘create the space for children to be involved in a broader range of experiences, the things they have missed such as competitive sport, drama and art’.
On recovery, both academic and on wider skills and wellbeing, Sir Kevan argued that this should be school led, as it is at this level that we can understand the actual Covid story for individual children, and build recovery up from their experience.
Sir Kevan also emphasised the importance of focusing funds to where it was needed most, especially disadvantaged students. On this, he argued that there would be no quick fix, and that we need to give schools an opportunity to plan for the longer term. He said that a ‘10-year plan would be about guaranteeing that funding over the long period, holding schools to account for it and really expecting some significant change in that work with disadvantaged children, starting with them very young and giving you the runway to work from the early years all the way through a child’s education life, rather than in episodes that don’t seem to be connected.’
Throughout the session, Sir Kevan raised important points about how we approach ‘recovery’, and indeed about wider perennial issues that Schools North East had raised in our Manifesto for North East Education, published in 2019. Unfortunately, it is not clear if the government’s current plan adequately addresses these concerns, with Sir Kevan noting that the response was ‘a bit feeble’ when compared with other countries. This is backed up by recent research from the EPI, showing that the total amount of catch-up funding equates to £310 per pupil in England, compared to £1,800 in the United states and £2,100 in the Netherlands.
Schools have proven throughout the pandemic their ability to rise to a range of challenges, delivering what is needed for their pupils. It is crucial that schools are now given the support and trust to address the impact of the pandemic, and Schools North East will continue to lobby for this.
