Today, Boris Johnson will host a special Cabinet away day at Chequers to discuss levelling up. Michael Gove, the minister in charge of turning rhetoric into reality, and Andy Haldane, the former chief economist of the Bank of England who is advising the government on the theme, will set out their plans at length.
Seven ministers have been asked to give quick-fire presentations lasting no longer than five minutes—detailing how their departments will have levelled up the country by 2024. But the Treasury has already made clear that there will be no additional funding beyond that set out in the Spending Review last month. And there is an enormous black hole where education should be.
If the prime minister is serious about narrowing the gap between wealthier and poorer parts of society and the country, then that has to start with improving opportunities for disadvantaged children and young people. Even before the pandemic, pupils on free school meals were more than 18 months behind their richer peers, and over the last two years the gap has widened.
The Education Policy Institute estimates that the pandemic has wiped out a third of the progress made over the last decade in closing the attainment gap between rich and poor, but the Treasury allocated less for Covid catch-up in the Spending Review than for scrapping the planned rises to fuel and alcohol duties. In fact, the chancellor spent longer in his Budget statement talking about scotch and sparkling wine than schools.
According to Luke Sibieta of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, core spending per pupil will be about the same level in real terms by 2024 as it was 15 years earlier—“a truly remarkable squeeze” that, in his view, will make it harder for schools to contribute to levelling up. One Whitehall source told me: “Rishi’s got a total blind spot about education—all of it, from early years through to universities and lifelong learning.”
The old Etonian Johnson is apparently even less interested than the Winchester-educated Sunak. Soon after he arrived at Number 10, the prime minister summoned the then-education secretary, Gavin Williamson, for a meeting to discuss education reform. “There was nothing there,” said one witness. “Boris had two ideas. He said: ‘when I was at school we would rank the children from one to 250, and that’s the kind of competitive spirit I want to introduce.’ The other was more classics teaching. Boris asked Gavin to stay behind after the meeting and told him to find extra money for Classics teachers. There wasn’t much levelling up going on in that discussion.”
In another Downing Street debate about the failure to close the social divide in education, one of the prime minister’s advisers is said to have suggested that “maybe that’s as far as you can go.” According to an insider: “There was a sense that that’s the order of things and that people have their level.”
As chair of the Times Education Commission—which is considering reform right through from early years to universities and will report next June—I have spent several months looking at the system. Two statistics have shocked me most. The first is that a third of pupils effectively fail their GCSEs—they do not achieve at least a grade four in English and Maths, which is the equivalent of a C under the old system and the minimum requirement for many jobs and training courses.
These children are effectively being written off at the age of 16 and declared failures by the system that is supposed to have nurtured their success. The unfairness is baked in because a certain proportion of students have to be allocated to each grade. As a college student who was attempting retakes put it to one of our commissioners: “I have to fail so that the other two-thirds can pass.”
The second figure that I cannot shake from my mind is that 40 per cent of the attainment gap that exists between advantaged and disadvantaged pupils at 16 is apparent before children arrive at school aged five. These children never had a chance—and the state is doing nowhere near enough to help.
I recently visited Estonia, which according to the OECD has the best education system in Europe. It comes higher in the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) rankings than the US and Japan as well as France, Germany and the UK. Estonian students’ socio-economic status has the smallest impact on reading outcomes in the OECD.
There are many explanations for its success, but teachers, advisers and the education minister all told me that early years provision is key to narrowing the social divide. Children do not start school until seven, but almost all go to high-quality affordable nurseries for at least three years before that, where they learn through play.
They are legally entitled to a kindergarten place from the age of 18 months, and nurseries are heavily subsidised so that parents never pay more than 20 per cent of the minimum wage (less than £500 a month). Pre-school teachers are highly qualified and are required to have a degree—they are educators rather than childcare providers.
Although its overall spending on education is comparatively low, Estonia has one of the highest levels of expenditure on early years as a percentage of GDP (in 2016 it was 1.2 per cent compared with the OECD average of 0.8 per cent—more than double the 0.5 per cent spent in England at that time). The differences between pupils from different backgrounds are therefore flattened before they get to a formal classroom.
Sunak acknowledged in the Budget that “the evidence is compelling that the first 1,001 days of a child’s life are the most important.” But his flagship announcement involved funding for 75 “family hubs”—when around 1,000 Sure Start centres have closed. The lack of ambition is staggering.
As education secretary and then justice secretary, Michael Gove always said that he wanted to help the “lost boys” (and girls) who had been failed by the system. Now he has the chance to do so as the minister for levelling up, and that will require reform as well as money. The prime minister seems to think infrastructure is the key, but roads, buses and trains are just a means to an end. The only way to really level up is through people—by transforming education.
