What would you say to the new secretary of state for education of a new government after next week’s general election if you were a top civil servant?
Obviously it’s a delicate line giving helpful advice and not being seen as meddlesome - you don’t want to be a real-life Sir Humphrey, let alone Malcolm Tucker.
But if it were me, I think I’d want to draw the new secretary of state’s attention to three statistics that tell a compelling and urgent story about what needs to be prioritised.
Statistic 1: The number of children facing destitution since 2017 has nearly tripled to over one million.
Destitution is defined as poverty so severe those affected cannot meet their basic physical needs to stay warm, dry, clean and fed. It is a subset of a much larger figure of more than four million children living in poverty overall.
No education policy, however well-formulated or resourced, is capable of overcoming the impact of poverty, and particularly of severe poverty.
Children who do not have even basic amenities are struggling just to make it through each day, much less be in a good condition to learn.
There is no chance whatsoever of closing the disadvantage gap in academic attainment in these circumstances, and every chance of a deepening divide between rich and poor, which undermines our country’s social, economic and moral cohesion.
Education cannot solve this problem on its own. It needs to be part of a cross-department strategy that makes tackling child poverty a number one priority. There is no policy more important.
An immediate and relatively simple step is to extend eligibility for free school meals to all families in receipt of Universal Credit and introduce a system of automatic enrolment.
Statistic 2: The number of pupils with an education, health and care plan (EHCP) has increased by over 80 per cent since 2016 to more than 430,000.
Funding has not kept pace with this rapid increase in numbers and the system for supporting children with special educational needs (SEN) is on the brink of collapse.
Many local authority high-needs budgets are in deficit, families are frequently left waiting for far too long for EHCPs to be issued, schools often cannot afford the level of provision that these children require, and there aren’t enough special school places.
The problem is not just underfunding though, but also that we are not getting support to these children early enough.
The new secretary of state has to accept there is an immediate fix required to stop the system falling over - and this, like it or not, comes down to money. This should include writing off local authority high-needs deficits.
But the system also needs to be refocussed on identifying special educational needs at an early stage and providing the specialist support required to prevent those needs from spiralling and becoming more complex and costly to address in the future.
Statistic 3: The number of young people aged 16 to 24 not in education, employment or training is estimated to be 900,000.
This is up by around 90,000 from 2023 and represents 12.6 per cent of all young people. The increase was driven by more young men falling into this category.
This means more than one in 10 young people are not actively engaged in activities that are important to their life chances. There will be all sorts of reasons for this but I daresay there is a crossover with statistics one and two.
And there is also something uncomfortable for us in education to acknowledge here. The curriculum is just not sufficiently engaging a proportion of young people in the way it should.
It is clear something needs to happen around the pathways that children can choose so vocational and technical education are prized as being every bit as important as academic pathways and resourced and promoted accordingly.
Yet, current plans to defund many Btec and similar qualifications are likely to make matters worse and lead to more young people not in education, employment or training. This has to be stopped.
The measure of a society
There are plenty of other statistics I could have mentioned - from funding to staff recruitment and retention in particular.
But the ones above relate directly to the children and young people who are on the margins. And those margins are actually really quite large.
This must be a starting point for the new government. If we cannot properly look after the youngsters who most need our help, what sort of society are we becoming? And what ills are we storing up for the future if we accept such inequities?
The true measure of any society, said Mahatma Gandhi, can be found in how it treats its most vulnerable members. That sentiment should be at the heart of policymaking.
Pepe Di’Iasio is general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders
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