Boris Johnson, Rishi Sunak and Gavin Williamson arrange themselves on one side of the 40ft-long, coffin-shaped table that fills the Cabinet room of 10 Downing Street.

It is the end of May 2021 and, for the past 14 months, education has been ripped apart by Covid-19: schools have been subjected to chaotic guidance, intolerable pressure and very little support; children have missed months of school and experienced a complete loss of routine and normality; school staff and parents are burned out; and every metric points to a crisis of childhood.

Opposite the three ministers sits the man they’ve hired to fix all of that. He’s been in post for four months. Back in February, they had crowned him the “catch-up tsar” and promised that he would make everything better.

Since then, he has created a plan - fully evidenced, fully costed. He’s answered all the questions. And he believes implementation is imminent.

But sitting in this room as the late spring sun struggles through the draped windows, Sir Kevan Collins knows something is up. Something happened over the weekend. A decision, somewhere, has been made.

He waits. And then they tell him the full plan is not going to be implemented. They say they can only commit to a tiny fraction of the funding. They promise him there will be more money to come: just sit tight, stick it out.

He resigns two days later.

“I was angry and I was disappointed,” Collins says now, three years later. “Actually, I was pissed off. There was an obligation for a national endeavour and we just failed at that moment.”

What follows is Collins’ version of how we got to that “failure”: the proposals put forward, the discussions that took place, the signals he wanted to send and the reasons he believes it all went wrong at the end.

The brief

“I got there, and I don’t want to denigrate the civil service as they are fantastic people doing a fantastic job, but I said: could you just show me your recovery plan and I can work from that? And there wasn’t one.”

In late January 2021, as schools struggled amid a second chaotic period of lockdown, Collins received a call from No 10 directly. He was asked what a recovery plan for education might look like, and he told them what he thought. Johnson offered him the job of “catch-up tsar” and the appointment was announced on 3 February.

“This was a full-blown national issue and I had to do my bit,” Collins explains. “The conversations were all with No 10 and I thought that was a good sign. It was being taken seriously. And I was told to be ambitious [on the budget].”

When he says there wasn’t a plan when he first turned up at the Department for Education in February 2021, what he means is there had been “a series of policies that hadn’t been stitched together as a cohesive framework”. He believes the focus had predominantly been on navigating the politics of school closure.

“That is where a lot of the energy had gone,” he argues, “rather than saying ‘we have had closure, what are we going to do about it?’”.

Up to the point Collins was appointed, the government had committed £1 billion to schools for Covid disruption: £650 million to be spent on how headteachers thought best in terms of education recovery and £350 million on the establishment of a National Tutoring Programme (NTP) for the most disadvantaged pupils (both announced in June 2020).

The £650 million was almost entirely wiped out by the immediate operational costs of coping with Covid: PPE, increased cleaning, supply costs and much else. The NTP, meanwhile, did not actually get started until November 2020.

One of Collins’ first jobs was to be the face of a second wave of funding: £700 million was announced at the end of February 2021 to predominantly fund holiday catch-up and expand the NTP.

He made it clear at the time that this had nothing to do with the recovery plan he had just started building.

“And I also said to colleagues at the DfE, who were very cockahoop they had this money from the Treasury, that this is just short term,” he recalls.

Indeed, Johnson’s instructions to Collins were very specific on the timing and scale of what he needed to do.

“The brief was: how do we fully recover the implications of this within the current Parliament - so three years from that point,” Collins recalls. “My response was that we could not fully recover in that period, but that there was a lot we could do.”

The damage

“It was clear the poorer you were, the worse it would be.”

Collins led a core team of around six people (whom he recruited himself) and had access to DfE resources and an external consultancy giving their time for free. Collins was also working for free throughout his time in the role. The first job was to assess the damage.

That proved tricky: even basic facts hid nuance. For example, on average, pupils missed 23 weeks of face-to-face teaching between March 2020 and April 2021, but the time period was longer in regions worst hit by Covid, while the situation for individuals differed depending on key worker status or other factors such as school capacity.

There was also huge variation in what was delivered by schools in terms of remote learning - owing to staffing, the technology available to families, funding and myriad other reasons.

“In those periods, we saw the variation in experience of kids widen - we saw it wasn’t consistent. And we saw how the system did not keep up,” says Collins.

His team had to cut through that complexity and come up with evidenced best guesses about the size of the problem they had been tasked to fix.

On learning loss, a large cohort of schools had been using Renaissance Learning maths and reading assessments pre-pandemic and the DfE commissioned them to be used during the pandemic so comparisons in attainment could be made.

Using this data, Collins’ team predicted there would be an average of three to five months of total learning loss across the pandemic, with the impact 50 per cent worse in schools with a higher proportion of children eligible for free school meals (FSM) compared with low-FSM schools.

Other sources cited by Collins’ team pointed to additional harms:

• Data from the BMJ revealed a 60 per cent rise in the number of children referred to mental health services in 2020 compared with 2018 - a rise of almost 200,000 referrals.
• A YouGov survey for the charity Kindred Squared showed an 11 percentage point rise in the number of children deemed not ready for school in 2020 compared with 2019.
• A DfE analysis revealed a 24 per cent drop in the number of children attending formal early years foundation stage (EYFS) settings in 2020 compared with pre-pandemic norms.
• Education Policy Institute (EPI) and Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) data suggested the attainment gap between disadvantaged pupils and their peers would return to the levels of 10 years previously, undoing a decade of work in which that gap was narrowed by 10-12 percentage points.
   

“We knew from this data that the impact was devastating for disadvantaged children and would have a detrimental effect on all children,” explains Collins. “On the basic attainment metric, we knew that this cohort of pupils would be behind other cohorts and could experience long-term negative consequences of that.

“The end point of school is finite - these children had had their timeline shifted and would potentially face a lifetime of disadvantage as a result. And that’s before you consider the mental health, social, emotional and other non-academic effects.”

It was the “beyond the academic” elements that were particularly difficult to quantify during that period of 2021: the missed social interactions, the delayed developmental milestones, the lost opportunities, the rites-of-passage moments snatched away, the health anxieties, the attitudes about education that were shifting, the impact of a collapse in mental health support services, the disappearance of team games, the economic pressure on families - the list was endless.

However, Collins tried to pull them all into his plan regardless by looking at the long-term impact of historic examples of school closures around the world - including the fallout from Hurricane Katrina - and taking first-hand testimony from the sector.

“I spoke to well over 1,000 parents, teachers and headteachers around the country during that period,” he recalls.

By the end of April 2021, Collins and his team had a better idea than anyone else of the scale of the challenge the country was facing. And his view had shifted as a result: this was not just about education, it was about much more than that.

“My remit was ‘education catch-up’ at first. I didn’t like the language of that, so it shifted to ‘education recovery’,” Collins explains. “But I wish I had pushed it further to become ‘childhood recovery’.”

The plan

“I was briefing the prime minister every week, meeting his people, meeting Gavin Williamson and DfE people all the time, the Cabinet office - there was a buy-in and a buy-in to this model specifically.”

Based on the challenges he had identified, Collins concluded there should be three key drivers for the recovery plan: it had to be school-led, long-term and targeted at those in greatest need.

These three drivers were translated into a plan based on the three Ts: teaching, tutoring and time.

“The most important was great teaching - that was critical to ensuring the recovery of children,” Collins says. “So we had to think about how we support teachers to meet the new challenges in front of them.”

He gives the example of one such challenge: the team estimated there would be an additional 75,000 children arriving in Year 7 the following year who had not achieved the expected level of reading at primary school. On that basis, Collins argued, Year 7 teachers would need substantial support to meet those needs - not just English teachers but every Year 7 teacher.

Another example was that Year 1 teachers would be teaching children who didn’t really have a Reception year.

“All of that learning that is so crucial to their development is missing,” argues Collins. “Socialisation, emotional resilience as well as academic. How do we support that teacher?”

So the team proposed funding a “substantial amount” of training, alongside accelerating the rollout of the Early Career Framework (ECF). In EYFS, this might mean money to spend on staff with higher qualifications or specific training on early language development. Further up, it would be money to spend on high-quality training, and where there were gaps in provision of the training, there would be money for developing new CPD tools in a similar way to how Oak National Academy was building lessons.

“I wasn’t interested in controlling what CPD looked like - it was about using the structures we had in organisations like the EEF to ensure we have the evidence [for the right approaches], the pupil premium accountability to ensure schools could justify the spend, and then trusting schools to use that money how they needed it,” Collins says.

He stresses that this was the element of the plan that cost the least but that was likely to have had the most impact because of the signal it would send out.

“What is amazing about this education system is that where there is shared collective effort, they move mountains,” he explains. “So the idea was: how do we harness that latent capacity? All the right signals have to be in place. I thought the sector was ready for us to send those signals, we had to say: ‘Schools, you are the most important part of the equation, we are going to get alongside you so you can do the things we know you want to do.’”

The second T was tutoring. Collins’ team concluded the NTP was on course to hit its target of reaching 250,000 pupils in its first year. Collins wanted to dramatically scale that up, so five million pupils had received tutoring by the end of 2024. The research suggested it could support three to five months of additional progress.

Collins was clear that tutoring should be managed - and dictated - by schools. The government’s job was to create provision in the market, to fund the tutoring and to ensure the training was in place to use the tutoring effectively.

“Schools know their children best,” explains Collins. “Our job was to get the market going locally so there was access to tutors.”

The final T was time. Collins’ team thought about time in a number of ways. First, simply making up the time pupils had lost during the lockdown periods. Second, ensuring that interventions such as tutoring did not disrupt learning - catch-up had to be additional time to prevent pupils from falling even further behind by pulling them out of lessons. Third, time for teacher training. Fourth, time for team sports, extracurricular activities, art clubs and more. And finally, using time as a statement of intent.

”‘Time’ signalled everyone was involved, that a major shift was needed,” Collins insists.

The idea was to set a minimum 35-hour week (Collins’ team had data that suggested many schools were not hitting this) and then, in the first year, to invite a large number of schools to increase the school day by a further half an hour - fully funded - for activities such as sport, art and choirs.

“You need to build relationships between children and school,” explains Collins. “What inspires and motivates pupils about the place? Sometimes that is a history lesson but sometimes it is this other stuff, and that other stuff needed to be rebuilt because, for so many kids, it is that other stuff that really matters to them. So how do we remind them that this asset, this building, belongs to them?”

Across everything he proposed, Collins remained adamant that schools were best placed to lead recovery, rather than have it dictated to them. And he says it was this that ultimately proved the key friction point with the Treasury.

“They didn’t really trust schools,” says Collins. “So more and more mechanisms of control were brought in and it got more and more complicated as we started to meet the demands of the Treasury.”

The budget

“Very early on, I said my initial assessment was that we were in the £10-12 billion levels of funding. That was as early as March.”

Collins was meticulous in costing the plan. The team developed some highly sophisticated modelling that put potential lost lifetime earnings of the pupil cohort at between £87 billion and £160 billion, and the result of lower-skilled workers and reduced innovation at an economic cost of £1.5 trillion. They also calculated a potential direct public cost of more than £20 billion if more young people ended up not in education, employment or training.

To avoid this damage, Collins’ plan came in initially at £15 billion. Each element of the plan had individual costings and each was fully explained. It was then sense-checked against the spending that other countries were committing to recovery. At that point, the US had committed £1,987 per pupil and the Netherlands had committed £1,792. At £15 billion, his plan would equate to roughly £1,680 per pupil.

“The plans of other countries weren’t telling me how much we would spend, but they were confirming my view this was a huge issue and what it might take to address it,” explains Collins.

He was clear this money would not be targeted on a per-pupil basis, however, but on a needs basis, using a pupil premium style mechanism but with a minimum allocation for every school. And though the cash would be based around those three Ts, schools would have freedom within that framework.

“It wasn’t about accountability, it was about taking responsibility,” Collins argues. “Schools are responsible for their own plan, for their own children, and we are going to resource that. You are going to tell us what you did, and how you responded, and tell us that story.”

The decision

“I still believe it was at the Treasury that the decision was made not to do it.”

Collins was in regular contact with the Treasury, No 10 and the DfE throughout his four months and he was clear about the scale of his proposal - both in practical and financial terms - from the outset.

“Every week, I would write a briefing update for the prime minister. I would get feedback on that and we would meet to talk it through. And that note went to the DfE and No 10 at the same time,” Collins reveals.

He was surprised to get very little pushback on his proposal.

“I was expecting more challenge on the guts and details of it,” he recalls. “But - and this may sound conceited - it seemed they bought into me a bit.”

The final proposal he submitted was a £12.5 billion package, rather than £15 billion. Sources close to No 10 at the time say the deal was as good as done as the end of May approached. Such was Collins’ confidence that he had started designing the implementation framework for it.

“We got very, very near the end and, at this point, the prime minister was fully behind it,” recalls Collins.

“And then there was a weekend where the idea was going to go proper official. And at the end of that weekend, I got called back in.”

In the Cabinet room on that Monday, Johnson, Sunak and Williamson told Collins the government would fund less than 10 per cent of what he had evidenced would be needed and that, until that point, everyone seemed to have agreed was necessary. The proposal - with its delicately intertwined interventions, signals and nudges through its three Ts - had been ripped apart.

The funding would be £1.4 billion: £1 billion on expanding tutoring (£579 million going to schools directly) and £400 million on training (including funding for Nuffield Early Language Intervention, early years practitioner training and National Professional Qualifications) - the latter dictated to schools, rather than schools being able to find the training they felt they needed. There was nothing left in terms of the third T: time.

“It fell so far short,” says Collins. “They just didn’t seem to get the fact that schools are the foundation of a fair and prosperous society. They didn’t get that our youngest pupils would not simply ‘catch up’ naturally over time. They didn’t get that you need a joined-up implementation of multiple interventions that knit together, that are of a scale that signals intent and that can make a real difference, that shows the sector you support them. They didn’t get that this had to be long-term and school-led.

“Even with the evidence in front of them, they didn’t get any of this.”

The legacy

“It wasn’t rocket science to say: ‘Look, children have been away for a while, you need to do something really intentional to get children back to where they should be and in the habit of coming to school every day. It has to be more than just telling them.’”

Collins doesn’t know for sure why his proposal was abandoned. Ultimately, he suspects it was down to a lack of trust in the return on investment and a lack of trust in schools.

He suspects, too, that there was a belief some of the effects of Covid would wash out with time, that the things a child missed in one year could be squashed into the next.

On the latter, he says that, particularly in the younger years, it is evident this has not been the case. And more generally, he believes the government thought too purely in academic terms.

For example, he says there was an opportunity to build upon the increased involvement of parents with education during the lockdown periods, and that this may have mitigated the attendance challenges we now face and helped protect the fragile relationship between parents and schools.

“The vast majority of parents understood that they had to do more for their children and just got stuck in,” he says. “How we held on to that and built upon it was an interesting question. How could we have signalled our gratitude and that this needed to be continued?”

He adds that we have not been ambitious enough, either, in continuing to push the role of technology in schools. He argues that there “hasn’t been an intentional determination about what we want to do about that experience” of increased technological use, be it honing teaching to individuals, providing extra opportunities for pupils and parents, or ensuring schools are set up for future closures - all of which could be having a hugely positive effect on the sector now.

“What signals did we send about this?” he asks. “Our signal is: here are some resources - resources are not the issue.”

In the three years since he resigned, Collins has also come to realise that, even if his plan had been approved, the government probably didn’t have the implementation framework to make it successful.

“The implementation framework came under huge strain and revealed that something is fundamentally wrong,” he argues. “The tier between a school and the government is just too big. If you are too far away, and it is all emails or online guidance, it won’t work.

“You need something in between. It works very well if a school is connected to a great multi-academy trust or a great local authority, but too many schools aren’t. It is too fragmented. It’s too variable - there are too many instances where the relationship is not strong enough.

“So I couldn’t grasp the theory of change for education at that time. It was broken. And it is still broken.”

Collins has no regrets about taking on the role. He doesn’t feel the four months were wasted, or that he was betrayed, or that he was a pawn in an exercise of buying time to reduce spend on education recovery. He does, though, feel deeply frustrated the government could not be persuaded to do more.

“All these things we could have done to send a signal about childhood,” he says. “But we did nothing. We gave up. It was pathetic.”

And despite all of his criticisms of the government, he feels acutely that the end result was his fault. It makes little difference to him that the people he worked with during that time say he did more than anyone else could have done to get the deal agreed. He still believes the argument was winnable in those four months he spent in government. And, ultimately, he believes he is to blame that the argument wasn’t won.

“I thought I had done enough,” he concludes. “But now I think: ‘What if I had another conversation there, had a bit more evidence there, done more with that person there?’ I keep running it around in my head.

“I had an opportunity; I had it at a moment of absolute national importance. I should have got it home. And I have to live with that.”

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