Schools deserve better post-Covid

SCHOOL and college leaders expect their working lives to be challenging. ey are used to coping with the unexpected and are experts at riding the wave of uncertainty that seems to be the new normality nowadays.

School leaders’ patience was tested further when the Government’s education recovery agship policy, the national tutoring programme, was awarded to Randstad, a Dutch company with – and it’s hard even to write this – no experience of running a tutoring programme. e consequence was that £5bn of public money was wasted. Eventually, and way after time, Randstad was axed from the national tutoring programme contract, as the Government reluctantly accepted that the £349 million of tutoring money for 2022/23 should be paid directly to schools.

Mary Bousted

Joint general secretary, National Education Union

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Leaders coped with Covid and the dysfunction of the Department for Education, which proved itself unable, throughout the pandemic, to communicate e ectively with the school leaders it relied so heavily upon. Two years of exam disruption caused by mutant algorithms (year 1) and a denial of reality (year 2) by Gavin Williamson, the then Education Secretary, who was utterly con dent that exams would go ahead in 2021 when it was obvious that such con dence was completely misplaced, have hardened leaders to the incompetence of Government ministers.

False promises

It is not as if things got better after the worst of the pandemic was over. Despite Boris Johnson’s assurance that education recovery was the Government’s top priority, schools got merely a third of the £15bn education recovery funds that the Government’s own recovery tzar, Sir Kevan Collins, said were needed to repair the damage done to pupils’ progress and learning by the pandemic.

An unclear future

I would love, at this point, to be able to write that this is a Government that has learned from the error of its ways, is willing to listen to the profession and to learn. I must, however, be honest and say that I see no sign of a change of direction. Partly this is because of the extreme instability of the Conservative Party – an instability that has resulted in ve Education Secretaries just this year. Now with a new (but for how long?) Prime Minister, it is far from clear what will happen next. It would be a brave union leader who made con dent predictions on what Government will do next, but I do not lack courage – so here are my thoughts on where ministerial thoughts will be heading.

e Schools Bill, which was to pave the way for the full academisation of schools, will be scrapped. It was an extremely poor, thin piece of legislation that managed to upset Conservative grandees in the Lords. Conservative councillors are, in my experience, as opposed to compulsory academisation as their Labour counterparts.

e grammar school expansion promised by former Prime Minister Liz Truss in her election campaign is more sound than substance. She would have to bring in enabling legislation and there is no guarantee that this would pass in the Commons, and it would be strongly opposed in the Lords. It is a row that she cannot, now, a ord to have.

Schools will face continuing funding crises next year: 37 per cent of primary schools and 26 per cent of secondary schools will see their funding rise by just one per cent next year. Even in the best-case scenario just eight per cent of primary schools and one per cent of secondary schools will see their per-pupil funding rise by ve per cent. With in ation running at over ten per cent, and likely to remain high into 2023, the funding crisis for schools will continue. Leaders will be forced to make a series of unpalatable choices – further narrowing the curriculum (already the narrowest in the OECD post-16); reducing support services; dealing with sta ng shortages and so on.

School leaders, post-pandemic, deserve so much better than this. And so do their sta and their pupils.