So you’re levelling up. As your government has spent the last 10 years levelling down, you’ll forgive me if I don’t cheer. To justify why the government has hit people so hard and for so long, I heard one of your predecessors Michael Gove on the Radio 4 Today programme this week repeating the theme song always played for this purpose: it was necessary to make cuts (translation: to make poor people poorer) because there was “no money left” when the government came to power. You’ll know, though, that billions somehow appeared from nowhere in the first phases of the pandemic. Perhaps you also spotted this week that there are great concerns now that some of that money was wasted. Could that be true?
I mention this because the journalists looking at the levelling up plans for education are struggling to find what hard cash is going to be handed over to schools. There might be some “creative accounting” going on: announcing “new” funding that is actually old funding.
