‘Levelling up’ agenda is ‘under serious threat’ if education not prioritised in budget, report warns
Significant, additional spending to help pupils to recover from lost learning will be required in next week’s Spending Review in order to avoid long-term damage to life chances and the nation’s finances, a new report from the Education Policy Institute (EPI) warns.
The report released today based on EPI analysis commissioned by the Department for Education (DfE), said failure in education may thwart the government’s “levelling up” plans.
The paper models the long-run impact of the pandemic on future earnings, finding that pupils are each likely to lose at least £16,000 in earnings, rising to £46,000 in a worst-case scenario if the government fails to intervene.
Taken together, it finds that losses to earnings would result in total lost national income running into the hundreds of billions – leading to substantial reductions in contributions to public services, and lower productivity and economic growth.
The new report lays bare the wide regional disparities in the amount of learning lost by pupils – differences that are yet to be addressed by the government under its current education recovery plan, saying that its calculations suggested a £13.5 billion spending plan was required to recover education.
It highlighted that pupils in parts of the north of England and the Midlands have seen learning losses that are greater than those in other regions, while poorer pupils nationally have also lost more learning – findings that are likely to greatly hinder the Prime Minister’s “levelling up” plans.
Before the pandemic, disadvantaged pupils were already 18 months of learning behind their more affluent peers by the time they took their GCSEs. The pandemic has now exacerbated this education gap, undoing a significant amount of the progress made in closing it over the last two decades.
Based on an estimated range of learning loss, this could result in total lost lifetime earnings of between 1 and 3%. In a central modelling scenario, this is likely to be at least £16,000 lost in earnings per pupil but could range from £8,000 to £46,000 per pupil, depending on the extent of learning loss.
These earnings losses would generate a total long-run cost of between £78bn and £463bn across the 10 million children in the education system in England. This range is likely to be a highly conservative estimate of the true long-run costs of lost learning.
Based on its latest modelling, the EPI report shows that an education recovery settlement of £13.5bn over three years will be required from the government to fully address learning losses and avoid cementing wide educational inequalities.
Newly appointed Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi has reportedly made a case to the Treasury for additional recovery funding beyond the government’s existing £3.1bn commitment.
Per pupil, current education recovery spending in England amounts to around £310 per pupil – a figure dwarfed by programmes in the US and The Netherlands, which amount to around £2,000 per pupil.
The new report also considers the future of the National Tutoring Programme (NTP) – the government’s flagship programme for helping pupils to catch up with pandemic learning loss. Researchers identify a number of risks that could impede the success of NTP as it enters its second full year.
Presently there are regional disparities in the NTP’s reach, with the take up of the ‘tuition partners’ element of the programme in the north of England far lower than the south (59% vs. up to 96%). This is concerning given the higher rates of disadvantage and learning loss in the north. To be effective for all pupils, the NTP must scale up the tuition partners element so that they can be accessed in “hard-to-reach” parts of the north and in coastal areas.
