There’s a great episode of South Park where a gang of gnomes start stealing peoples’ underwear. At one point they are asked to explain themselves and present a business plan, it says: “Collect underpants”, ”?”, “Profit”.

I thought of the gnomes as I read the schools section of the government’s levelling up White Paper.

It presents a sober analysis of the regional inequalities in attainment, largely driven by economic disadvantage, and a very ambitious “mission” around ensuring 90 per cent of pupils hit the end of primary school standards by 2030.

Unfortunately, there’s a big question mark between these two sections.

A limited set of announcements 

There are a few policy announcements.

There will be 55 Education Investment Areas covering the lowest performing local authorities - though it is entirely unclear what investment they’ll get beyond some small retention payments for maths and science teachers (that were announced last year after being scrapped the year before).

They follow in a long series of similar initiatives from Labour’s Education Action Zones and former education secretary Justine Greening’s Opportunity Areas, none of which have shown any real evidence of impact.

There is also a commitment to 11 new highly selective post-16 institutions in every region that will benefit a small number of students who are already doing well enough to get high GCSE grades.

And that’s pretty much it apart from a welcome commitment to turn Oak Academy, developed to provide support to teachers and families during the pandemic, into a permanent national institution.

These measures are small scale, continuations of existing projects and aren’t even aimed at the primary age group. So how this new “mission” is supposed to be achieved is left entirely to the imagination.

Fiefdoms and partygate

To be fair, I suspect the Department for Education’s Schools White Paper due in a month or so is going to offer a little more explanation but, in the absence of any new money, it’s hard to see how such a target can be achieved.

I don’t blame levelling up secretary Michael Gove and his “levelling up” team for this.

The sections of the levelling up White Paper that relate to his own department are thoughtful and involve serious change, including more devolution. But the sections that required agreement and input from other departments are extremely weak.

The structure of Whitehall makes cross-departmental working difficult at the best of times.

No one wants to give up control of their fiefdom, nor do they want to hand any significant announcements to another secretary of state.

The only way to make this happen effectively is if the prime minister properly backs it and engages with it, as Tony Blair did, at least some of the time, with Sir Michael Barber’s Delivery Unit.

It is fair to say Boris Johnson has a lot on his mind at the moment but even pre-partygate, he was not known for his interest in policy detail or his willingness to hold a consistent line.

As he has put no pressure on other departments to engage properly, or on the Treasury to cough up any extra cash, the levelling up team had an impossible task.

Is it mission impossible?

The risk is that the commitment to a “mission” that is frankly unrealistic, even if set for 2030, risks distorting education policy over the coming months and years.

The government will want to show some improvement towards this target before the next election and that means putting pressure on primary schools to focus even more time and effort on key stage 2 tests.

This can only be done, in the short term, by creating yet more accountability levers, even though the ones we have already create perverse incentives to game the tests.

There is a lot of serious policy work going on in the DfE around the content of the Schools White Paper, with some big questions that have been ignored for a long time like “what is the role of local authorities in an academy based system?” and “how do we create a sustainable funding system for special educational needs and disabilities?” 

It would be a huge shame if this was railroaded because of the need to push primary schools towards an arbitrary target.

It would also be extremely poorly received by primary headteachers coming out of two exceptionally difficult Covid years and already subject to test-based metrics and Ofsted.

After all, the last thing we need is more school leaders quitting.   

The hope is that the DfE can convince No 10, for the time being at least, that broader policies to improve the whole system will help progress towards the target.

Gimmicks aren’t going to fix decades of regional inequality, but they could make the problems even worse.

Sam Freedman is a former senior policy adviser at the Department for Education and a senior fellow at the Institute of Government