The Department for Education (DfE), which was last week accused of being “surprisingly resistant” to investigating the shortfalls in its Covid response, is now reportedly backing “sweeping reform” to help make up for the disruption caused to education by lockdown – and to avoid the £1.5 trillion cost of doing nothing. This could include extending the school day by half an hour under a £15 billion “Covid [that is, lockdown] rescue plan”. The Times has the story.
A leaked presentation of a report by Sir Kevan Collins, the Government’s Education Recovery Commissioner, calls for all children to receive an extra 100 hours of schooling each year from 2022, with a minimum 35-hour week.
The ambitious plan for England proposes extra tutoring for five million pupils and additional training for 500,000 teachers. It also hints that an extra year of sixth-form should be considered if teenagers cannot complete A-level courses in time.
The report warns that the cost to the country of inaction could be £1.5 trillion, 100 times the cost of the three-year package, but the Treasury is thought to be offering only £1.5 billion, a tenth of what is said to be needed to help pupils to bounce back from the pandemic.
A 56-page presentation based on the report, dated April 15th, is described as a draft that is 90% complete. One Whitehall source said that nothing had “changed fundamentally” since then.
At the heart of the document are the “three Ts” – extra time, teaching and tutoring. It says that all three combined are essential to catch up. This means lengthening the school day, improving teaching through more training, and providing tutoring on top of lessons.
Schools are likely to have a degree of freedom over how they choose to extend the day. Adding the 100 hours evenly each day would roughly add up to half an hour of extra schooling. Teachers would be paid more for the work.
Boris Johnson has been briefed on the findings, and in meetings with Collins has indicated support for the plan…
The DfE is also backing sweeping reform. However, Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor, has balked at the cost of the package, which is equivalent to about £700 per pupil over three years. One insider described the £1.5 billion offered by the Treasury as “ridiculous”.
The news comes as the Times Education Commission embarks on a year-long inquiry that will lead to recommendations for reform…
Children have missed almost half a year of in-person schooling, with about 23 weeks of school closures during the pandemic. According to the report, the U.K. had the longest closures of schools and universities combined in Europe.
Worth reading in full.
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That’s right, demolish the education system and then pour more taxpayers’ money over the ruins.
A longer school day is precisely what children don’t need.
At last – someone with a brain!
The bloated public secror blew it and wants to fix it by becoming even more bloated.
What else is new?
And the sheep/boiling frogs will likely approve of it again.
Are you really that dim that you have nothing to offer but banging a broken drum of nonsense?
I count three self-confessed duggies
And one arrogant… Teacher??
So, already mentally exhausted from lockdown, physically exhausted from mask wearing and probably spiritually exhausted from all the adults bickering, they now want to add to children’s burden. Way to go. How about actually asking the children themselves by way of a survey, with options for how to make up missed schooling…. it’s called a democracy and children have had very little say in this fiasco so far.
I’m not so sure. There is a reason why children are not able to vote and that is because they are children.
You think they are less competent than the government and SAGE?
You’ve got me there.
Not able to vote for govt is somewhat different to answering questions about their own education.
“how to make up missed schooling”
Sadly – it can’t be done – only ameliorated by wise decisions that are not in the repertoire of this lot.
Isn’t amelioration making up for missed schooling?!
The government should accept that it has failed all children generally by allowing a perverse culture of non-achievement to destroy the school system, and more specifically/spectacularly over the past year by locking them away with their unthinking, stupid, and occasionally abusive parents.
Abolish the unions and start over again. There’s nothing to be salvaged from this disaster.
As well as the Unions abolish the government, Bill Gates, Klaus Schwab, SAGE, Spi-B, Imperial College, LSE, Most other universities, testing and vaccine Centres, Police Forces especially the Met, BBC, most other MSM, paid for “experts”, the NHS, GPs, schools, Tories, Labour. SNP and things just might start looking up.
From this day until the ending of the world the 29th of June will be known as ‘Non compellable witness day’
(Apologies to Will Shakespeare….. no not that one the other one)
I’ll happily rename my birthday.
Noise
They were going to extend the school day hasn’t happened
They were going to shorten the school holidays, hasn’t happened.
They were going to run summer schools, hasn’t happened.
The children finish the same time, they are now on half term, they have the standard Summer holidays planned, Nothing has changed
Our local comp turfs the budding morons out at lunch time, finish.
I have a better idea, how about cutting the summer break to 3 weeks, the easter break to 1 week and the Christmas break to 1 week for the next 2 years, brilliant…
And do people think that the teachers’ unions are going to be OK with that? First there will be another round of disruption from them until they get a large pay rise.
Teachers and their Unions are in complete denial to the impact that school closures, which they shouted for, have had on children’s education and mental health.
COMPLETE DENIAL.
I keep hearing…. My OH/ daughter/ friend is a teacher and worked incredibly hard throughout ….
Sorry doesn’t wash, yeah worked incredibly hard implementing CRUEL, UNNECESSARY measures on kids. Where were they standing up for the wellbeing of the children??
If it had been an assault on their pay and pensions we would have heard all about it. They would have been on strike, pickit lines at every school gate. But instead, like the infamous gaurds if old they went along with every harsh measure, just following orders.
At least the headteacher at my child’s primary school was honest with me when I challenged her about some of the extra measures she brought in which were not mandated…
She said she had a duty of care for HER STAFF.
And there it is… Sacrificed the well being of the Child for the teacher.
The sooner the teaching profession face up to this truth the better. They are complicit in their silence, they condoned incredibly cruel measures on children and they think they deserve our respect. They are beyond contempt.
“Teachers … are in complete denial to the impact that school closures”
Meaningless, dumb virtue signalling doesn’t solve anything. The only thing you got right was the role of the unions.
This is a stupid comment, ranking with government misinformation as a diagnosis.
Rick H your whole post is a vacuous, condescending, sideshow.
Are you a teacher…. Cause you sound as though you are in
complete denial!!!
As an American teachers union head said
When schoolchildren start paying union dues, that’s when I’ll start representing the interests of school children.”
I think the same can be said for here.
But if this whole episode has proven one thing above all others it is how little regard the English have for Education or for the welfare of Children in gerneral.
Parents have on the whole been silent on the woeful quality of Education that was provided during Lockdown and the lack of focus on catching children up on return.
It appears that Parent, Adults and teachers have been more concerned with protecting themselves by masking, segregation, constant testing and blaming children for the disease than they have in concerning themselves with the damage they have put onto children
I understand that teachers had legitimate concerns. But what I won’t stand for is the way they are now trying to sidestep any responsibility or blame. They shouted loudly to implement measures, they put pressure on Government to close schools, they are up to their eyeballs in the whole mess… And they think they did a good job.
Just as a matter of interest, why should teachers be expected to take responsibility – nobody else in society is, for anything?
Zero of the changes made to fight Covid made any sense.
The abandonment of examinations is perhaps the biggest s**t show of all. Now we are going to see grade inflation on a legendary scale. Who knows what the universities are going to get by way of student.
I am sure that some teachers are biology teachers. They must understand that when a certain number of people are infected there is no way out other than herd immunity. They must also understand that an untested vaccine is a dangerous substance. Mix in the fact that children were known to be unaffected by Covid and you have to wonder why the biology teachers didnt have a word with their colleagues.
I have to add that at my daughters school they did all they could within the rules to educate their pupils, physically at the school itself where possible. Some teachers did the right thing as far as the rules they were subject to permitted. Sadly that doesnt apply to all teachers.
“I am sure that some teachers are biology teachers. They must understand …”
They are trapped in this fascism as much as anybody else. And the ‘unions’ have been so far up the arse of government that they have ceased to have any function in terms of co-ordinating coherent resistance.
Biology Teachers?! Start with ‘GPs, Drs and Scientists’ – there is no hope.
How utterly, utterly stupid. Worthy of the sort of ignorant non-think exhibited by Gove and Cummings when they were the deadly duo who f.ed the business (and went on to repeat performances.
It shows the detachment of Whitehall and Westminster from reality and any knowledge of what they piss about with – ironically the result of the other, privileged, end of the deeply dysfunctional education system from which they are recruited (see ‘Johnson et al’).
The idea that you can mend the damage done over the last year by some sort of cramming routine is barmy beyond belief. The talentless gofers at the DfE need to be put back in their box.
I do remember a time when there were genuine professionals doing the job. ‘Twas not always thus. Then the short-trousered ‘bright’ neophytes from Oxbridge with nil experience began taking over as ‘generalists’, whose main ability was to speak craven ignorance to power and f. things up before moving on to f. up elsewhere with nothing learned.
Children’s learning simply doesn’t work like that. And the current Gradgrind curriculum, which is full of misconceived top-down garbage imposed by the ignorati, isn’t the issue. What is the issue is the critical slice of normal life and development that has been stolen from children – thus compounding the damage done by the ignorati.
Yes. I do have steam coming from my ears. Every time I think we’ve reached the nadir of lying ignorance ….
I haven’t agreed with a lot you’ve said elsewhere, especially on the nature of Marxism and the socialism/capitalism issue (a largely meaningless distinction in my opinion), but on education you are right.
I can only think the downvotes are from a combination of your often abrasive tone and the fact that many people are stuck in the modern educational paradigm.
The education system didn’t work before and is largely both a product and cause of the problems that have enabled the current nightmare. Schools breed slaves for the Oxbridge owners of capital. Schools are about indoctrination and the instilling of obedience. Throwing money and time at them simply feeds the problem; it ramps up the meaningless non-stop brain drain culture that they propagate.
Attacking teachers for behaving like complete tools would be rather like taking issue with the fact that concentration camp guards take too many cigarette breaks at the expense of both tax-payers and the welfare of the inmates.
“I haven’t agreed with a lot you’ve said elsewhere, especially on the nature of Marxism and the socialism/capitalism issue”
I think you’ve mis-read : I’ve said nothing about ‘the nature’ of ‘socialism’ or ‘Marxism’. I wouldn’t bother, because this isn’t the forum for any such debate, and is just a distraction.
What I have said is that the mickey-mouse attribution of all current ills to these two fuzzy terms is brainless – especially in a crisis that obviously has unrestrained free market capital at its root and is one of its main drivers.
In fact, my main strictures have been about the tendency of some to use this forum to bang the drum of wildly extravagant and irrelevant political prejudices rather than focusing on the problem at hand. I’ve actually avoided simplistic political stuff – except to counter irrelevant generalisations.
There’s a lot of simplistic duggie comments here about the failings of schools and teachers.
Their axe-grinding nature is generally an ironic commentary on the prejudiced ignorance of the authors, rather than an advertisement for something better!
Not a good look for a site that boasts intelligent rational scepticism.
RickH like everyone else on here, you are simply contributing your own opinion, ironic commentary, prejudices.
Unless I am mistaken.
After a pathetic start last year most schools managed to get some schooling done remotely in this year’s lockdown.
I’d say that the experience of the last 18 months has shown that there’s a need to be much smarter about education.
For example, we could have all children watching videos of ‘the best teachers’ teaching each given topic, and then the time spent face-to-face with the teacher could be spent as a tutorial, identifying areas where the pupils didn’t quite get the video lesson.
If there was a need to extend the school hours the video lesson could be done in pupils’ own time when they got home, with the tutorial later in the week.
Done this way there’d be very little in the way of additional costs.
In fact, I think they could find that they wouldn’t need so many teachers if they did this, so a smart response to this might actually result in government saving money.
There are serious social implications to this idea. To illustrate the problem imagine a situation where Neil Ferguson was appointed national teacher of Biology…
We need devolution of power, not more “experts”.
Not a practical idea based on any evidence.
The ‘remote’ schooling has been a massive failure . Again, it’s about the big money selling their products, not about proper education.
Technology obviously has a place – but it’s a minor one; education requires interaction, not the constant intervention of wonky 2-D technical ‘solutions’ devised by wonks.
I think this model might work well for universities where the students ought to be self-starters, but I am not convinced it’s a good one for schools.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with using online material where it’s of high quality, but I think it should be at school with a teacher present.
They’ll require more money in the future due to further lost education when more house imprisonments are enforced next flu season.
The children I observe are exhausted by the last year, and the teachers who have been teaching on line throughout are worn out too. Masks have been a nightmare for health, energy and, in secondaries, discipline. Many haven’t had their books marked for a year because of the Covid spreads by touch lies. They’ve just got their masks off, you’ve messed up the exams, they’re shoving sticks up their noses, for heavens sake let them get back to normal.
They do not need extra time.
They need the Government to stop lying,
They need to be set free,