The government’s former education catch-up tsar has blasted the ‘pathetic’ response to Covid disruption, saying schools were not trusted to lead the recovery.
Sir Kevan Collins, who resigned as education recovery commissioner in a row over funding, has spoken out about the four months he spent trying to get the government to take education recovery seriously.
He stepped down in 2021 after the government agreed to fund just 10 per cent of his £12.5 billion proposed recovery package.
Speaking to TES Magazine, he said: “All these things we could have done to send a signal about childhood. But we did nothing. We gave up. It was pathetic.”
He said he believed his plan had the backing of then prime minister Boris Johnson and was about to be made official when he was called into the Cabinet room and told the funding would be just £1.4billion – less than ten per cent of what he had said would be needed.
Sir Kevan said this was partly due to a lack of trust in schools by the Treasury. He told the magazine: “They didn’t really trust schools. So more and more mechanisms of control were brought in and it got more and more complicated as we started to meet the demands of the Treasury.”
Sir Kevan had proposed a substantial amount of extra teacher training, a dramatic increase in tutoring and an increase in the length of the school day.
Ultimately a much smaller amount of money was allocated to tutoring and some teacher training.
He said: “It fell so far short. They just didn’t seem to get the fact that schools are the foundation of a fair and prosperous society. They didn’t get that our youngest pupils would not simply ‘catch up’ naturally over time...They didn’t get that this had to be long-term and school-led. Even with the evidence in front of them, they didn’t get any of this.”
He added: “It wasn’t rocket science to say: ‘Look, children have been away for a while, you need to do something really intentional to get children back to where they should be and in the habit of coming to school every day. It has to be more than just telling them.’”
Sir Kevan had been tasked with planning how children could make up for months of lost-learning during the pandemic. Before taking on the role he had been chief executive of the Education Endowment Foundation. He has worked in the education sector for more than thirty years, including as a teacher and a director of children’s services. As catch-up tsar, he reported directly to Boris Johnson and then education secretary Gavin Williamson.
Sir Kevan also told TES Magazine he remains deeply frustrated that the government could not be persuaded to do more, and, despite people he worked with saying he did more than anyone else to get the deal agreed, ultimately blames himself. He said: “I thought I had done enough, but now I think: ‘What if I had another conversation there, had a bit more evidence there, done more with that person there?’ I keep running it around in my head.
“I had an opportunity, I had it at a moment of absolute national importance. I should have got it home. And I have to live with that.”
A spokeswoman for the Department for Education said: “We have invested £5 billion in education recovery, including up to £1.4 billion on tutoring, and have significantly increased support for disadvantaged pupils through the National Tutoring Programme.”
