The former schools recovery tsar, Sir Kevan Collins, has blamed the government’s failure to back his catch-up plan for the stark north-south divide in last week’s GCSE results.
While more than 28.4% of entries received the top grades of 7-9 in London, only 17.6% got these scores in the north-east and 18.6% in the north-west of England. A-levels results showed a similar picture. While in London 30% of A-level grades were graded A or A*, in the north-east it was 22% and in the north-west 24%.
Collins told the Observer this weekend that his “greatest fear” after Covid was that without proper investment gaps would widen between children in the north and south, and between the least and most privileged.
He resigned two years ago as schools recovery commissioner when ministers agreed to fund only 10% of the £15bn package he said was vital to boost school education nationwide in the wake of the Covid pandemic. He said: “I take no comfort in the idea of ‘I told you so.’ It feels very sad.
“This was the biggest disruption in education since the second world war and there was no moment of saying: ‘Right, we are going to grab this and address it.’” He added that ministers made a “huge mistake” and “let children down”.
Children who were well supported by families and schools had recovered pretty well from the pandemic, Collins acknowledged. However, he said that those without such support “have been really badly hit in ways that I could not have imagined then”.
This point was backed by the Rev Steve Chalke, whose Oasis foundation runs 54 academies in deprived areas of England. “It is so frustrating that the government didn’t back Collins’s recovery plan. The writing was on the wall then and these GCSE and A-level results put the final nail in the coffin of levelling up. The geographical differences are stark.”
Jonny Uttley, chief executive of the Education Alliance academy trust, which runs eight schools in Hull and the East Riding of Yorkshire, also endorsed criticisms of the government’s failure to act to tackle schooling issues. “Sir Kevan laid out exactly what needed to happen to help children catch up, and policymakers chose not to hear it. As a consequence you are now seeing yawning gaps again between the advantaged and the less advantaged.”
The criticism was joined by former Tory MP Justine Greening, who resigned as education secretary in 2018. “In its decision to reject that plan just months later, not for being wrong, but for being too expensive, the leadership of the Conservative party showed a breathtaking level of short-termism,” she writes in the Observer today.
“It also showed a profound ignorance of the education recovery plan’s social, economic and political need. Ignorance of the social need because its impact would so inevitably fall on the most disadvantaged. Ignorance of the economic need because in a 21st-century UK economy, driven by human capital and facing an acute skills shortage, a country with no long-term talent strategy is the definition of a country with no long-term economic strategy. And ignorance of the political need, because as this week’s GCSE results illustrate, so many schools on the wrong side of the education inequality divide are disproportionately in the northern “red wall” seats crucial for the Conservative party’s electoral fortunes.”
The Department for Education said: “Millions of students are receiving extra support to catch up including through tutoring, and backed by £5bn.”
