For once, the failure of a government to find extra funding for education was not greeted by all teachers as unadulterated bad news.

When Tes revealed at the weekend that the Treasury would not be stumping up the £15 billion needed to pay for an extended school day any time soon, some teachers quickly made it clear they regarded that as a good thing.

It’s not just that staff are exhausted by a pandemic that has added to what was already a huge workload, it’s that some teachers never believed the policy could work in educational terms anyway.

But once their sense of relief subsides, where does the catch-up cash that never was and the abrupt departure of Sir Kevan Collins - the catch-up tsar calling for it - leave schools and everyone who works, teaches and learns in them?

Exclusive: Sir Kevan Collins resigns over catch-up plan

Missing: No extended school day in new £1.4bn catch-up plan

Exclusive: Sir Kevan Collins’ extended school day plan hit by lack of cash

Catch-up tsar: Sir Kevan Collins says he has ‘nothing to lose’

Revealed: The plans on the table for extending the school day

Whatever your views on lengthening school hours, the bald fact is that an extra £15 billion or anything approaching that sum could have made a positive difference.

Yes, the idea from the government’s now ex-education recovery commissioner was for an extra 100 hours a year in school per pupil - equating to a bit more than half an hour a day - as Tes revealed last month and a leak confirmed on Monday.

Covid catch-up: Schools would have had flexibility over extra hours

But school autonomy was also central to that plan, as Sir Kevan has since made clear. He wanted “a flexible extension to school time” that schools would also have been able to use “to offer enrichment activities that children have missed out on”.

“From the perspective of teachers, extra time would have been optional and paid,” he said. And allowing time for the less controversial, extra tutoring side of the plan was a key reason for wanting to lengthen school hours.

“It would be counterproductive if pupils were removed from the classroom for academic help to be delivered, and equally misguided if music or sport were squeezed out in the rush to catch-up,” Sir Kevan has explained.

Yes, his plan reportedly included the spectre of an expanded Ofsted lurking to check up on how schools spent the extra money - a prospect unlikely to be welcomed by many school leaders.

Chances of £15bn for schools now vanishingly thin

Nevertheless, with so much freedom over how heads spent the extra money and used the extra time, it is difficult to see how these billions could have been anything but a good thing for schools and their staff and pupils. But the chances of them actually turning up in schools’ bank accounts now seem vanishingly thin.

Wednesday’s announcement of the underwhelming £1.4 billion catch-up package did include a suggestion that more funding might materialise further down the line. The “next stage” of the education recovery plan would “include a review of time spent in school”, which would inform the next government spending review, the Department for Education said.

But if the Treasury wasn’t convinced by an extended school day and couldn’t agree to more than £1.4 billion now, then why would it have a sudden change of heart several months later in an autumn review?

Don’t forget this review will cover the three years right up to the next general election and education funding needs will have to fight it out against a wider “levelling up” agenda, likely to be prioritised by a government desperate to hold on to “red wall” seats.

A ‘stealth cut’ and a funding freeze

And all that comes against a backdrop of already worrying funding news for schools and their leaders. Yes, there was a pledge to boost schools’ coffers by £7.1 billion by 2022-23 - an achievement a proud Gavin Williamson was harking back to this week as the education secretary came under fire for only securing a tenth of the funds Sir Kevan asked for.

However, even this early “boost” will, in fact, only take schools back to the funding levels they had 13 years previously - in reality, it is a prolonged real-terms funding “freeze”.  

Since then schools have seen new funding pledges that actually turn out to amount to recycled education money, not to mention the current pupil premium “stealth cut”, all coming against a backdrop of the bills heads face for the financial cost of Covid safety measures they have had to fund over the past year.

But how on earth did we get to this bleak position for schools when it was only three months ago that the prime minister was describing education as his “biggest priority”? Sir Kevan’s warnings in the spring, couched in “horrifying statistics”, reportedly made a deep impression on Boris Johnson, inspiring talk of a “four-year emergency plan” to get children back on track.

Downing Street wanted a longer school day

There were even plans for a major speech from the PM to “level with” the country about the challenges society faced post-pandemic. All of this underlines the point that it was not DfE that was challenging the extended school day plan, but 10 Downing Street itself.

Sir Kevan was the PM’s appointment and it was Mr Johnson who he convinced that action was needed. Which begs the obvious question - if the leader of our country wanted funding for longer school hours, then why haven’t we got it?

Only those involved in the talks between Downing Street and the Treasury will know for sure but there are several possible reasons. From the Treasury’s point of view, they will have been saying that the bottom line is that the country is facing huge pandemic costs and simply can’t afford to spend such a huge upfront sum on education.

Education’s ‘Boris Island’?

If Downing Street pushed back then chancellor Rishi Sunak’s officials will have been able to point to the other levelling up priorities that the PM wants, and funding the catch-up plan may have required trade-offs that Mr Johnson felt unable to stomach.

Had he overpromised? Or perhaps it was that he just lost interest in the idea - was the extended school day a passing prime ministerial whim that was always destined to go the same way as the “Boris Island” airport or the plan for an Irish Sea tunnel with a roundabout under the Isle of Man?

The extended school day felt like a much more serious proposition, of course. But the local flexibility that would have made it more tolerable to schools may also have made it much harder to secure Treasury funding for. How can you prove something is worth shelling out billions on if you don’t know exactly how it will work in schools?

Teaching unions being blamed

There was also the important issue of how it played with parents - a YouGov poll found that 60 per cent opposed a longer school day, although other polling released since has found net support. And lastly, teaching unions. Their antipathy to what they feared would result in even longer hours for their members may or not have played a part in the government’s effective rejection of the idea. But it is definitely being wheeled out as an excuse for it now.

Yesterday morning as Home Office minister Victoria Atkins - doing the media rounds on behalf of the government - was asked about the extended school day, she said: “We do have to bring teachers with us on this journey.”

Vaccines, and former schools, minister Nadim Zahawi was more explicit as he deflected any suggestion that the Treasury might be to blame.

“The same people who are attacking us... are the teaching unions who resisted the idea of extending the school day in the first place,” he said. 

Education has lost a champion who had the PM’s ear 

Sir Kevan’s departure, the flexibility he recommended and the realisation that schools will be more than £10 billion worse off might make some of those teachers who had opposed a longer day consider whether it wasn’t such a bad idea after all.

The ex-recovery tsar has more than made his point this week with a measured but devastating attack on this government’s “undervaluation of the importance of education”. And the argument in his resignation letter that “the apparent savings offered by an incremental approach to recovery represent a false economy, as learning losses that are not addressed quickly are likely to compound” make a strong case for why the funding was needed immediately.   

But now education has lost its champion in Downing Street - the man who had the PM’s ear. Will anyone remember any of his arguments this autumn when government budgets are actually being decided for the next three years?

By then the newsprint containing Sir Kevan’s articulate pleas for more hours will be as yellowed and spent as the falling leaves. And once again it will be schools and their leaders being expected to pick up the pieces when winter descends.