The Budget mustn’t ignore how Covid has marred the life chances of the poorest children

Anyone hoping that Rishi Sunak will cough up serious extra funding to help schools rectify the damage wrought by Covid will be sorely disappointed, writes Ed Dorrell

‘It was only in the spring that Boris Johnson told his newly appointed catch up tsar that there was essentially no limit to his commitment to fix lost learning’ (POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

If you take a stroll through a town or city centre on a Friday evening – assuming you can ignore the many boarded up shops – you would be forgiven for imagining things are back to normal.

Bars, pubs, restaurants, taxis and public transport are doing great business. People clearly have a strong urge to get back in the swing of things. Similarly, offices are beginning to show signs of life. Setting to one side the increases in infection and the heightened likelihood of ‘Plan B’ being implemented before Christmas, it is clear that people want Covid-19 to fade into memory. The pandemic is something that is often discussed only in the past tense, even written off as a bad dream.

I see this in the focus groups I run – people are less and less keen to talk about their experiences of the pandemic. They want it to be done, over, finished.

It seems to me that this widespread attitude is what Rishi Sunak and his Treasury team thinks will allow them to imply during Wednesday’s comprehensive spending review that lost learning is a thing of the past. That they have already done enough to help the millions of poor students who fell behind their wealthier counterparts when their schools were mothballed during lockdown.

“Having looked through it all,” Sunak told Times Radio last week, “it’s pretty clear the two things that make the biggest difference to children’s learning is tutoring in small groups and making sure teachers have all the development and training and support they need to be absolutely brilliant.

“We have pretty much maxed out on those things,” he added, pointing to the £3bn the government had committed to the National Tutoring Fund. “Because there is a constraint on how much of that can be reasonably delivered.”

So there you have it. The government has “maxed out” on funding catch up – we can expect nothing or next to nothing extra this week.

How quickly things change. It was only in the spring that Boris Johnson told his newly appointed “catch up tsar” that there was essentially no limit to his commitment to fix lost learning, and that it would be his government’s number one priority in post-pandemic recovery.

When Sir Kevan took the prime minister at his word and came back with a costed £15bn plan for extra investment in schools, teachers and extra teaching time, the government famously baulked, triggering the resignation of their tsar, when they instead offered just £1.5bn.

When Sir Kevan’s furious resignation letter went public and the media pounced on this example of ministerial penny pinching, sources attempted to paper over their PR problem by hinting heavily that there would be more cash in the 2021 comprehensive spending review.

Which brings us to this week, and Sunak’s Super Wednesday, with a Budget and a three-year comprehensive spending review rolled into one. But, as Sunak’s radio appearance hints, anyone hoping that he will cough up serious extra funding to help schools rectify the damage wrought by Covid will be sorely disappointed.

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A couple of months after Sir Kevan stood down, a coalition of school leaders and educationalists took ministers’ hints and put together a much more moderate catch up plan, costed at £6bn. Even this now looks likely to be far in excess of the funding ministers are prepared to invest.

On this subject – once, apparently, the prime minister’s top priority – Sunak is betting the house (11 Downing Street) that as Covid fades into memory, so too will voters’ desire to think about the damage caused by coronavirus on the educational opportunities of some of this country’s poorest young people. I for one hope that this gamble does not pay off.

We must do our very best to remember the children who paid for lockdown with their life chances, and who are now likely to be grievously let down by the adults in government.