Chancellor Rishi Sunak has announced that the education system is to receive an extra £1.8 billion in funding to resolve the disruption caused by repeated lockdowns and in-person teaching cancellations due to students or staff receiving a positive Covid test. Approximately £1 billion will be reserved for disadvantaged primary and secondary school children, with the money largely being allocated towards extra-curricular activities and extra tuition for pupils who require it. The Telegraph has the story.
“The Chancellor has shown that we will put money behind enhancing the recovery we know is already under way for young people, building on the real impact of the steps we’ve taken so far, whether that’s tutoring, world-class teacher training or summer schools”.
The majority of the new catch-up cash – £1 billion – will be earmarked for disadvantaged primary and secondary school children aged under 16.
Schools will be allowed to decide how to spend the money but they will be encouraged to use it for evidence-based interventions such as small-group tuition and extra-curricular activities like sports, drama and art.
Meanwhile, the remaining £800 million will allow sixth form students, aged 16 to 19, to have an extra 40 hours a week of lessons over the academic year, which is equivalent to one additional hour a week for each school or college.
The amount of money set aside to fund pupils’ catch-up has been a source of tension in Whitehall. Earlier this year, the Government’s own catch-up tsar quit after warning that the amount of funding did “not come close to meeting the scale of the challenge”.
Sir Kevan Collins’ resignation in June came less than 24 hours after Gavin Williamson, then Education Secretary, announced a new £1.4 billion cash injection for pupil tuition and teacher training. Sir Kevan had advised ministers that Government funds of £15 billion over three years were necessary to reverse the damage done by Covid to pupils’ education.
Kevin Courtney, Joint General Secretary of the National Education Union, accused Sunak of coming up with a catch-up plan “on the cheap”.
Geoff Barton, General Secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said that while the funds were a “step in the right direction” they were “nowhere near what is needed”.
Mr Sunak told the Commons on Wednesday that an extra £4.7 billion of core funding will be provided to schools in 2024-25 and £153 million will be spent on early years education to “address the impact of the pandemic on the youngest children”. He also said that more than £200 million will be made available for holiday activities and food programmes.
Worth reading in full.
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Government always thinks the solution to bad government is just more government. It’s really not.
My kids’ school doesn’t need more money. It just needs a period of normality without the government causing fear, uncertainty and doubt over COVID.
As Ronald Regan said:
Yes, well that entailed dumping the sick and disabled on the street – Thatcher did it too.
Please can they just give everyone their lives back, and go away. They could make everything better without spending a penny.
Just a wee bit of freedom.
“£153 million will be spent on early years education to “address the impact of the pandemic on the youngest children”.
This government is a collection of truly brainless twats (perhaps a precondition of current success in politics).
You cannot replace lost time like this simply by stealing more from somewhere else. Children grow, and time is lost beneath the scars.
The concept is ludicrous – particularly if you are part of the conspiracy of those guilty of shoving a Gradgrind curriculum down kids’ throats – which operation has already wasted uncountable hours of their time.
You cannot now simply replace the massively important social interactions. That opportunity has gone in the wasted time.
But you might have the humility to use a bit of nous and brass to ditch all the fallacies and improve schooling and childhood in general.
… but that would mean re-thinking imaginatively and learning a few stark lessons instead of – like all the nutters in the asylum – carrying on in the same old groove, thinking that ‘more’ is the same as ‘better’..
P.S. The money is loose change in a national context – pure window dressing. Ask anyone who has handled education budgets.
Loose change which is still stolen/extracted by the government perpetrators from other people’s pockets, let’s not forget that.
You could copy and paste your second para and apply it to all these articles. It would be truely applicable every time.
Unfortunately they are also ‘greedy’ twats who have their heads in the trough. Can’t interupt the Pfizer business models can we, otherwise all those lovely bungs stop. Can’t possibly think about using the Valneva jab either for exactly the same reason.
This reminds me of a joke about how a band of skinheads has saved the life of an elderly lady. They stopped kicking her once she fell.
The money will be spent. There’ll be no benefit to the expenditure.
That’s how it works these days, from the NHS to higher education to the money spent on roads.
Government, whether national, local or ‘at specialist level’ (hospitals, education) only knows how to spend money.
What recovery would that be?
Trash the economy, reduce tax receipts and then try to fix the problem by chucking in money that doesn’t exist.
Can the government just stop doing things, stop spending money it doesn’t have or ever will, get out the bloody way and let us get on with it.
“Extra curricular activities… and holiday activities”. I’m sure the teachers unions will be thrilled about putting their members at additional risk after school hours.
As long as children are continually messed about with, forced into “masks”, pressured to accept injections and generally subjected to an unceasing stream of terror propaganda, no money in the world will undo the harms that have already been caused to them. Quite apart from the academic or educational scars and damage caused to attainment now and future prospects, the avalanche of mental ills that children and young people are suffering, and which have been acknowledged by even the Government MSM puppets are not soluble by Government’s modest handouts or by their continual, ignorant interference.
Those who purport to try to remedy these things seem unable to understand that they have, by their actions, caused them directly. I include in that the various teaching unions and bodies that have contributed to the wrecking of their charges’ educations by their actions (or inaction).
Why do politicians always think that throwing money at a problem will resolve the problem. A child has now spent a good portion of their lives with little or no education due to governmental hysteria (why didn’t they follow national and international procedures on pandemics) and no amount of money is going to give children that time wasted back.
‘Mr Sunak told the Commons on Wednesday that an extra £4.7 billion of core funding will be provided to schools in 2024-25 and £153 million will be spent on early years education to “address the impact of the pandemic on the youngest children”. He also said that more than £200 million will be made available for holiday activities and food programmes.’
This beggars belief. These people are either utter morons or they’re playing the part of utter morons.
1. ‘[E]arly years education’ has and will have gone for most of the children impacted by this regime’s actions.
Moreover, this goes much further than ‘education’. Children have suffered from isolation. They have been propagandised into a state of fear. Yet this tinpot dictatorship wants to feel good about itself by slinging money at/banging on about educayshun. Astonishing.
2. Children have not been ‘impact[ed] [by] the pandemic’ but rather by the disastrous and monstrous policies of a regime completely out of control. The only thing the virus really had an ‘impact on’ was the mental faculties of those now scrambling to ‘catch up’ after bringing about their own disaster.
“[E]arly years education’ has and will have gone for most of the children impacted by this regime’s actions.”
Exactly. The only thing that stays is bullshit – fear, masks, jabs, mistrust and exclusion.
Funding shmunding. Stop the nose-jabs, stop the monkey gunk coercion, take off the facepants and bloody get on with it.
How about an easy accessible disruption fund for the thousands of peeps damaged by the vaxxes?
When Pfizer signed up lab rats, [cough] I mean human volunteers for their COVID mRNA trials – pages 132/33 of the protocols make for interesting reading…
As in sexual connections:
https://cdn.pfizer.com/pfizercom/2020-11/C4591001_Clinical_Protocol_Nov2020.pdf
10.4. Appendix 4: Contraceptive Guidance
10.4.1. Male Participant Reproductive Inclusion Criteria
Male participants are eligible to participate if they agree to the following requirements during the intervention period and for at least 28 days after the last dose of study intervention, which corresponds to the time needed to eliminate reproductive safety risk of the study intervention(s):
• Refrain from donating sperm.
PLUS either:
• Be abstinent from heterosexual intercourse with a female of childbearing potential as their preferred and usual lifestyle (abstinent on a long-term and persistent basis) and agree to remain abstinent.
OR
• Must agree to use a male condom when engaging in any activity that allows for passage of ejaculate to another person.
• In addition to male condom use, a highly effective method of contraception may be considered in WOCBP partners of male participants (refer to the list of highly effective methods below in Section 10.4.4).
10.4.2. Female Participant Reproductive Inclusion Criteria
A female participant is eligible to participate if she is not pregnant or breastfeeding, and at least 1 of the following conditions applies:
• Is not a WOCBP (see definitions below in Section 10.4.3).
OR
• Is a WOCBP and using an acceptable contraceptive method as described below during the intervention period (for a minimum of 28 days after the last dose of study intervention). The investigator should evaluate the effectiveness of the contraceptive method in relationship to the first dose of study intervention. The investigator is responsible for review of medical history, menstrual history, and recent sexual activity to decrease the risk for inclusion of a woman with an early undetected pregnancy.
10.4.3. Woman of Childbearing Potential
A woman is considered fertile following menarche and until becoming postmenopausal unless permanently sterile (see below). If fertility is unclear (eg, amenorrhea in adolescents or athletes) and a menstrual cycle cannot be confirmed before the first dose of study intervention, additional evaluation should be considered.
Women in the following categories are not considered WOCBP:
1. Premenarchal.
2. Premenopausal female with 1 of the following:
• Documented hysterectomy;
• Documented bilateral salpingectomy;
• Documented bilateral oophorectomy.
For individuals with permanent infertility due to an alternate medical cause other than the above, (eg, mullerian agenesis, androgen insensitivity), investigator discretion should be applied to determining study entry.
Note: Documentation for any of the above categories can come from the site personnel’s review of the participant’s medical records, medical examination, or medical history interview. The method of documentation should be recorded in the participant’s medical record for the study.
3. Postmenopausal female:
• A postmenopausal state is defined as no menses for 12 months without an alternative medical cause. In addition,
• high FSH level in the postmenopausal range must be used to confirm a postmenopausal state in women under 60 years of age and not using hormonal contraception or HRT.
• Female on HRT and whose menopausal status is in doubt will be required to use one of the nonestrogen hormonal highly effective contraception methods if they wish to continue their HRT during the study. Otherwise, they must discontinue HRT to allow confirmation of postmenopausal status before study enrollment.
Makes sense of the post jabbed shedding phenomena doesn’t it? They’ve always known.
Ditto any woman having lost a baby, or a miscarriage or suffering any birth anomaly in fact, that and any menstruation irregularities no matter the female’s age, now you know where your damages lawyers can look for culpability if you were not explicitly warned pre being consensually jib-jabbed.
You weren’t clearly informed?
Oh dear…
Agree will all of of your excellent comments above. It is now time, after doing the unthinkable i.e lockdown, to say the unthinkable as a response.
Dear people who live politics more than life,
Quite simply, we, the people are done with politicians who only serve themselves and their weasel cohorts. We the people are done with the second rate education system that educated nobody into anything like being a Human Being.
We the people demand our rights to live our lives in peace and prosperity with everyone.
This means we have no further use for you and we demand, nay we own the right to lead our lives in the best way we can, free from coercion, taxation, exclusion and any other ism. Where is the education for this?
Get out of our way, because we are coming! No amount of money is worth what We want!
I hope you’ve written to your government representative to say just that. (I doubt very much that they read these comments.)
My apparent representative loves us so much he couldn’t give a flying one about us!
That’s the governments answer to everything THEY caused isn’t it? Just throw money at it! Money doesn’t cure the problem. You can bet your life the NHS and education bosses will spend this money given to them on anything but health and education!
It’s the answer of the ridiculously super rich (and/or wannabe super rich) to everything. They think the little people will be so grateful to receive their crumbs that they won’t complain about their kids’ futures turning into miserable grey dust.
Your Government’s decision to put the UK under house arrest, Rishi and fuck up our kids’education.
https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/nih-admits-funding-gain-function-covid-experiments-gives-ecohealth-five-days-report
NIH Admits Funding Gain-Of-Function COVID Experiments; Gives EcoHealth Five Days To Report Data
It’s 5 days later. anyone know what’s happened with this?
If only they hadn’t spread the hysteria and panic in the first place, which they did deliberately, by their own admission, with their whopping budget for the campaign of fear. If only.
And yesterday, our 15 year old daughter received a letter addressed to her offering a Covid ‘vaccine’
Nothing to do with her refusing a clotjab at school of course.
Totally unprincipled bastards
It’s the word ”offer” when applied to children that is most sinister. Reminiscent of someone in a dirty raincoat ”offering” a bribe of sweeties to a child, in return for questionable practices.
There is no amount of money that can make up,for kids losing nearly two years of their education. None.
So does that mean they’re not going to issue a diktat for another ‘lockdown’?
Children just need normality, without fear or threats or abusive ”medical” practices – with committed teachers who are not wimps. That doesn’t call for extra money.