Virus ‘ historic chance to level up education’
Charity calls for end of inequalities
THE CORONAVIRUS recovery should be used as a “moment in history” to empower and invest in devolution to combat the glaring generations of structural educational inequalities that start right from a child’s birth and is holding back the region’s communities, a leading Northern education charity has warned.
Fiona Spellman, the chief executive of the Yorkshire- based education charity SHINE, told The Yorkshire Post: “Education has to be absolutely central to the Government’s leveling up agenda because we know that regional inequalities in our country start very young before children begin school.
“We need to have a recognition that some of these regional disparities are long term in nature so they need long term solutions and long term solutions and longterm thinking.
“In a sense we have to think about the children and young people in the North of England now and ensure they get the best opportunities if we are really going to deliver on the Government’s agenda to level up opportunities across the country. We see education right from birth right through as being really central to that whole agenda.”
On Saturday, The Yorkshire Post reported on calls on the Government by northern education leaders to expand an educational scheme, which has raised standards in three areas of Yorkshire, across the whole of the North.
Yorkshire leaders said the recovery from covid- 19 should be used to place long- term investment into education and empowering more local communities across the North of England and Yorkshire, to fight against generational educational inequalities.
Speaking exclusively to The Yorkshire Post on Saturday, Anne Longfield, the Yorkshire- based Children’s Commissioner for England, said that without targeted investment, “we will see is another generation of children who fall behind, fall out of school, don’t reach their potential or indeed move out of the area to be able to take up opportunities elsewhere”.
The leader of Leeds Council, Judith Blake said: “Right across the North we are extremely concerned and we are particularly concerned that the Department for Education in a very centralised government system in England is probably the most centralised department of all.
“The argument from those areas that already have some form of devolutions and the areas that are moving towards it is that the Government needs to be far more open to our real experience and evidence that working on this agenda locally achieves far more of a sustainable outcome focused approach.”
Ms Spellman added: “It is about additional resource and the Government’s commitment to levelling up does have real quality financial backing but also that investment is targeted and spent in a way that can actually deliver change for children and for their families for whom levelling up remains more of an aspiration than a reality at the current time.”