Sunak is forgetting the lost children of lockdown

It’s not just because I am functionally innumerate that I’ve got a Pi-sized problem with Rishi Sunak’s maths to 18 plan. Unlike Simon Pegg, who launched a typically Lefty-luvvie tirade against it on social media this week, it isn’t even because I think the Government should also be prioritising arts and the humanities, important though those subjects are.

No, the point is that when it comes to schooling, the Prime Minister would be better off making sure children stay in school in the first place, regardless of what they are studying.

Research by the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) shows that the absence rate in schools has skyrocketed since the start of the Covid lockdowns, which have left a deep, unhealed scar in education provided by the state.

In the autumn term of 2022, school absenteeism was 7.3 per cent, up 2.4 percentage points from 4.9 per cent during the same period in 2019, according to Department for Education (DFE) figures.

The Dfe’s annual report stated: “Attendance at education settings is lower than business-as-usual rates and this attendance ‘gap’ cannot be explained by directly permissible Covid-19 related absences.”

Before the pandemic, 921,927 children were persistently absent in the autumn term of 2019, and 60,202 children were severely absent. By the spring term of 2022, those figures had shot up to 1,927,581 and 118,548 children respectively. That’s a doubling of absenteeism.

So why is government energy being spent on additional maths when many pupils aren’t studying maths at all? Too often, these lost kids are either dismissed as a statistical irrelevance or conveniently wiped from political debate. But together they constitute a lost generation, having vanished in the midst of Covid lockdowns.

Maths is admirable, Mr Sunak, but the dire state of our educational system requires you to focus on the most fundamental issues.