Policy focus is now on schools

Johnson’s admission at PMQs

BORIS JOHNSON’S choice of words at Prime Minister’s Questions was significant when Labour’s education spokesman Wes Streeting equated the size of the schools catch-up plan to 43p per pupil per day.

“We will have to do more because it is the biggest challenge our country faces,” the Prime Minister told MPs after defending the £2bn that the Government has set aside for tutoring, and so on, during the past year.

Mr Johnson was right on both counts. Education policy has been overlooked on too many occasions and, as the country emerges from the lockdown, the focus will shift from the NHS and vaccines to the challenges facing schools, colleges and universities.

But the lack of detail about how the DfE intends to spend the extra £400m, and how it clearly expects teachers to give up part of their summer holiday to assist with remedial studies, remains indicative of Gavin Williamson’s haphazard leadership at a time when schools, parents and pupils want clarity rather than calamity.

And while the PM has decided, against the judgment of The Yorkshire Post and others, to keep Mr Williamson in post as Education Secretary and to allow him to preside over the full reopening of schools from March 8 onwards, Sir Kevan Collins, the Education Recovery Commissioner, needs to be given a more prominent and public-facing role – families are far more likely to trust individuals of his repute than the Secretary of State.

For, just as Mr Johnson now regularly defers to both Chris Whitty and Sir Martin Vallance because the public hold the Government’s senior scientists in such high regard, a similar approach now needs to be followed when it comes to education, exams and the issue of lost learning. As the PM said himself, this is now the biggest policy challenge. It will also become even greater as the nation begins to move to the next phase of the Covid recovery plan.