On 2 July, Education Secretary Gavin Williamson announced that since the ‘battle against this virus has become ever more successful’, there would now be a ‘carefully planned’ return to school, college and nurseries for all students this September. The ‘successful’ reopening of schools to more pupils since 1 June saw rising numbers of suspected Covid-19 outbreaks, from 14 in the first week of increased pupil numbers, to 55 by the start of July according to Public Health England. The ‘careful plan’ includes no funding to cover reopening costs for schools which have suffered a decade of austerity. Instead, piles of public money will be poured into lucrative government contracts for private companies from a Covid ‘catch-up’ package. Meanwhile, child malnutrition is on the rise, and thousands of students still cannot access online learning. RUBY MOST reports.
Covid ‘catch-up’: gift to private tutoring companies
The Department for Education (DfE) announced the details of its £1bn Covid ‘catch-up’ package on 19 June. The figure was chosen to sound impressively large in headlines but is completely inadequate given the extent to which the state education system has been undermined by over a decade of cuts. Williamson ludicrously claimed the package ‘will protect a generation of children from the effects of this pandemic’. £650m of the £1bn is to cover one-to-one or small group tuition in the 2020/21 academic year, and is due to be split evenly between schools, regardless of the level of poverty of those attending. According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, this amounts to a derisory £80 per child. Many working-class children have suffered bereavement, trauma, increasing poverty, and food insecurity during this pandemic, and other vital support services are also cut to the bone. At least 2,500 children have been hospitalised with malnutrition in the first six months of 2020, double the number in 2019. A few hours of academic tutoring will do nothing to ‘protect a generation of children’ from this grim reality.
Organisations involved inthe National Tutoring Programme
The other £350m of the package is designated for a National Tutoring Programme (NTP) to ‘increase access to high-quality tuition for the most disadvantaged young people over the 2020/21 academic year’. The organisations behind the NTP plans are; The Education Endowment Foundation, a government-funded education charity; the Sutton Trust, run by multi-millionaire Sir Peter Lampl; and the Impetus Trust, a charity which calls itself ‘the UK’s pioneer in venture philanthropy’. There are two pillars in the NTP: NTP Partners and NTP Coaches. To access NTP Partners, schools will pay for subsided sessions from a list of approved tutoring companies; they will be expected to cover a quarter of the cost from their own budgets in the first year, and more in subsequent years. This cost is significant when many school budgets are so severely stretched that some were closing early even before the coronavirus pandemic began. Private tutoring companies get the subsidy as a payment from the government, and then this is topped up by school budgets; public money syphoned off from a state education system in desperate need.
NTP Coaches will be employed as tutors by schools directly and paid a salary from the NTP fund, with schools paying their pension and national insurance costs. Teach First, the teacher recruitment charity has been given £6.44m from the government as the sole organisation to recruit and train tutors for the NTP Coaches pillar. Teach First will provide only one week’s training to graduates if they have qualified teacher status or two if they have a degree in anything else. Despite the government’s rhetoric about spending the summer on ‘Operation Catch Up’, the first NTP coaches are not expected to be in schools until October. It is yet another short-term scheme which will do more to benefit influential charities than provide a well-funded state provision of education for all children.
Cutting ‘catch-up’ to pay for… ‘catch-up’
When the details of the £1bn Covid ‘catch-up’ package were revealed on 19 June, the Further Education (FE) sector had been explicitly excluded in a last-minute amendment. The FE sector, which encompasses colleges and other education and training for 16-19 year olds, has faced some of the deepest cuts to its funding; the results have been ‘serious failings in England including stagnant wages, casualisation and insecure working conditions for staff’ and reduced hours and lower quality study and fewer courses to access for students (see FRFI 275 Education Notes: Mixing Business with Education). This funding crisis is predicted to accelerate as the FE sector now potentially risks losing £2bn of income due to the coronavirus crisis, according to estimates by the Association of Colleges.
After an outcry from the FE sector, the DfE U-turned a month later on 20 July, saying there would be a one-off grant of up to £96m for the sector to use on small group tutoring sessions for disadvantaged students. This is not new funding but will be slashed from the £350m NTP fund. The DfE have so far refused to state whether or not the £1bn package, which still excludes Early Years providers, is ‘new’ funding at al, or whether it comes from existing budgets. This followed the revelation that a £55m ‘catch-up’ grant for literacy and numeracy, for year seven pupils who start secondary school behind their peers, was cut just after the Covid ‘catch-up’ package was announced. The DfE confirmed to the education publication Tes on 24 June that this funding will not be replaced.
Digital poverty and online education
The Tutors’ Association (TTA) which is advising the government on the NTP Partners pillar has recommended ‘online should be the primary delivery mechanism’ for the tutoring sessions, given the likelihood of further localised lockdowns. While online education is being held up as an alternative to in-school learning, thousands of young people do not have access to a suitable device or broadband with which to use it.
As of 20 July, the government’s scheme to provide free laptops and tablets to a limited number of children who need them has fallen short by 4,072, with 13 councils reporting to Tes that they did not receive all the devices they requested. The total of 230,000 devices promised by the end of June was anyway inadequate, as it only covered limited categories of children with no devices to access online learning: ‘disadvantaged’ year 10s, care leavers, and those with a social worker.
Digital Access for All, a taskforce launched by the Learning Foundation charity found that by the end of 2019, at least 100,000 households with school-aged children had no broadband connection. This means that even with a device to access online learning, many of the poorest working-class families are being charged huge bills for accessing learning online, as pay-as-you-go is much more expensive than a monthly broadband bill. According to Tes, accessing the government-funded Oak National Academy for three lessons per day for a month could cost as much as £860. The DfE had promised to make their list of approved sites free to access; however only two websites have so far been made data-free to access. One of the websites is Edenred, the private company responsible for the government’s disastrous free school meals voucher scheme, notorious for its website crashing and failing to provide food vouchers to thousands of families during lockdown. Edenred secured a government contract valued at around £234m without a tendering process.
Britain’s decaying capitalist system cannot offer all children the right to a decent education. We must fight for a socialist system where people’s needs come first.
