Last week the Department for Education published its long-awaited Schools White Paper, setting out its strategy for tackling some of the biggest issues facing teachers and young people today - from academic attainment to behaviour, attendance and wellbeing.

The direction of travel is - broadly - a good one, and the government’s ambition is welcome, but there are some pressing issues that still need to be addressed.   

The principal pledge of the White Paper is the promise to - in the government’s words - “level up” education by setting a target for 90 per cent of primary school children to achieve the expected standard in key stage 2 reading, writing and maths by 2030.

This is welcome, although it is a tall order, given that the current figure for England is 65 per cent.

But this averaged figure masks the vast regional disparities that exist in learning loss due to Covid-19.

In the Commons Education Select Committee’s most recent report, Is the Catch-Up Programme Fit for Purpose?, published in early March, we found that the average learning loss for maths for primary pupils was 5.3 months in Yorkshire and the Humber, compared with 0.5 months in the South West.

The good intentions of the White Paper will not be fulfilled unless we ensure the catch-up programme is really working and that pupils are shown to have recovered educationally from lockdown.

Schools White Paper: Different levels of Covid learning loss 

The White Paper makes repeated references to targeted tutoring as a solution to help children whose attainment falls behind expected levels, embedding one-to-one and small group tutoring as a “permanent feature of the schools system”.

The school standards minister, Robin Walker, announced the delivery of 1.2 million “blocks” (15 hours) of tutoring to children as part of the catch-up programme.

But these figures again mask significant regional disparities.

By March 2021, the National Tutoring Programme had reached 100 per cent of its target numbers of schools in the South West and 96.1 per cent in the South East, but just 58.8 per cent in the North East and 59.3 per cent in the North West.

I am pleased that, as our report called for, the government announced the termination of its contract with Randstad, with funding now going directly to schools.

Randstad’s performance showed us that rolling tutoring out as a panacea does not always deliver equally across the country.

Schools are best placed to know how to best support their pupils and must be directly involved in the process going forward.  

I was also encouraged by the department’s commitment to introduce a standardised minimum length of the school week of 32.5 hours. It is my hope that, as recommended in the committee’s catch-up report, schools will be able to take advantage of the additional time to develop skills and interests in sport and the creative arts.

Enriching the school week

The White Paper makes reference to “a richer school week”, with all children “entitled to take part in sport, music and cultural opportunities”.

We know from a recent Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) report that an extended school day that enables children to participate in extr-curricular activities can boost numeracy skills by 29 per cent.

The committee will be monitoring with interest the Department for Education’s promised collaboration with DCMS, which, according to the White Paper, will produce updated plans to support sport and music education, as well as a cultural education plan.

As outlined in our report, the committee is particularly keen to see these plans extended to children in the most disadvantaged areas, as having that breadth of skills and experience will allow young people to climb the ladder of opportunity.

For this reason, we called for a pilot scheme in the country’s most disadvantaged areas, which would explore facilitating extracurricular activities - as has been done in Wales.

It is hoped that the government’s response to our report - and the coming sport, education and cultural education plans - will factor in the evidence we heard in favour of such a pilot. 

Support for the Parent Pledge 

As important as the role of schools in the catch-up plan is, we cannot underestimate the power of parents in increasing attendance, attainment and engagement in education. I strongly welcome the emphasis placed on parental engagement in the White Paper.

The “Parent Pledge”, which will ensure that parents are fully involved in their child’s catch-up, is an acknowledgement of the alienation that some parents feel from the education system.

This is of particular concern in disadvantaged communities, where often parents’ first engagement with their child’s school was a result of bad behaviour. Forming healthy relationships with parents must be of paramount importance when engaging families to support their child through their school years.  

It is vital that this parent-school relationship is further prioritised when addressing the 124,000 “ghost children”, who the children’s commissioner estimates missed more than half of their school sessions in the autumn term of 2021.

As a committee, we have urged the department to take steps to address the issue of persistent and severe absence by working with schools and local authorities to set out proactive measures to encourage students back to school. I hope that the “Parent Pledge” marks the first step of this journey.  

The role of multi-academy trusts

Another key element of White Paper is multi-academy trusts (MATs). I am supportive of MATs and have no objections to more schools becoming part of academy trusts.

The key question is whether or not these academies will be properly inspected by Ofsted (which they are not at the moment) and whether they will genuinely reflect the communities that they serve.

I am concerned that some MATs will become so large that they become indistinguishable from big corporations.

Sometimes small really is beautiful.

The secretary of state has said that the purpose of this policy is to ensure that schools join successful academies and, as a result, best practice is spread far and wide. But what will the intervention mechanisms be if those very large academies begin to fail many thousands of pupils?

Curriculum questions

I read with interest the significance the White Paper placed on a “knowledge-rich” curriculum. But what about a skills-rich curriculum, too? There is a £9 billion skills gap in the UK, and employers have told us time and time again that oracy, problem-solving, financial education, technical and vocational skills are what they look for. 

Moreover, the take up of design and technology subjects is declining at an alarming rate. Figures published by the Education Policy Institute just last week show that student entries for D&T have halved over the past decade. Increasing evidence suggests that we are simply not preparing our young people for the future world of work and the fourth industrial revolution. 

The committee’s current inquiry into the future of post-16 education has heard that while students in Britain do relatively well when it comes to reproducing subject matter knowledge, they have far greater difficulties in demonstrating practical ways of working and applying the knowledge they have learned.

Andreas Schleicher, the OECD’s director for education and skills, told us that “in a world where the kinds of things that are easy to teach and to test are becoming easier to digitise and to automate, that is a significant risk”. This should be a worry for the government. Skills should not just be focused at post-16 education. 

In the House of Commons on Monday, the secretary of state declared that the skills minister is dedicated to embedding skills within the education system. Indeed, education secretary Nadhim Zahawi stated that T levels are “runways that career paths will take off on”.

The proposals in the Schools White Paper provide the foundational fuselage for the aeroplane as it journeys down this runway.

However, I urge the government to remember the critical importance of both a skills-rich and a knowledge-rich curriculum as the wings of the plane - it is not a case of either/or.

Without these wings, the aircraft cannot take off and the government will risk failing in its ambition to deliver a world-leading education system.  

Robert Halfon, Conservative MP for Harlow and a former skills minister, is chair of the Commons Education Select Committee