Nadhim Zahawi is certain that schools have enough money. So certain, in fact, that when devising a White Paper that sets targets requiring substantial school investment, he says he didn’t ask for any more money from the Treasury to fund it.

“I have been given a settlement [in last year’s Spending Review] that I think is a big settlement,” he tells Tes in his only one-to-one interview with an education publication for the launch of that White Paper today. 

It’s a confident statement from a confident secretary of state, delivering a White Paper that is very sure of itself. 

There is much that many school leaders will like about the White Paper. Many have been calling for greater clarity around the government position on managing behaviour and the White Paper does attempt to make it clear that schools should be in charge of how behaviour - and particularly exclusions - is managed.

The continued funding of the Education Endowment Foundation and the establishment of Oak National Academy will provide a resource base that, as long as the use of both is kept free and optional, will be a lifeline for many. 

And the promise that the academisation drive will include local authorities and that regulation of multi-academy trusts (MATs) will be looked at will cheer many who have called for both things for some time. 

‘Front-loaded’ funding

However, there are other elements that will worry leaders - the foremost being how this White Paper’s objectives will be funded. 

The Spending Review funding settlement Zahawi is referring to above, alongside previous funding announcements, amounts to significantly less than the rumoured £15 billion that former recovery tsar Sir Kevan Collins believed was necessary to get children back to where they were pre-pandemic. 

The White Paper expects schools to go beyond recovery and instead put hundreds of thousands of children ahead of the trajectory they would have been on before March 2020 (read more here). So did Sir Kevan - the former CEO of the Education Endowment Foundation, who was given access to all the data government could get its hands on - get his sums wrong?

“I have huge respect for Sir Kevan Collins,” Zahawi replies. He then explains at length why the current funding is adequate to deliver the White Paper objectives. 

“The investment that we are putting in, you know, I secured £7 billion before 2025 and much of that is front loaded,” he explains. “Plus, of course, if you look at the evidence for high-performing multi-academy trusts and what they can deliver, if we achieve that for the whole system, then we will deliver on those [primary and secondary attainment] targets.”

The insinuation appears to be that funding is not the potential issue; the problem, instead, is how schools are organised.

And yet, at the start of the year, one in five heads expected to have to make significant cuts in the next 12 months. Earlier this month, the Public Accounts Committee stated that the department “has little assurance” that the extra £4.7 billion committed for school funding in the 2021 Spending Review “will be enough to cover cost pressures including the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic”. And, as Tes reported back in January, schools - MATs among them - are facing astronomical energy cost rises. 

That’s all on top of schools footing the bill for making up for gaps in the mental health, social care and special educational needs and disability (SEND) services. 

Tutoring and targets

Is there no hope of more money to make this White Paper work, then?

Eventually, Zahawi hints at a small glimmer of a possibility: “I will make sure we have the evidence, so we evaluate how we are doing. There is already very clear positive evidence for primary school children doing better in terms of literacy and numeracy; I want to see that evidence at secondary as well. And then if I need to, I will go back for more funding. But the focus has to be on, ‘let’s get this right for the £5 billion and then keep going’.”

That hope won’t be a comfort to school leaders who will now face stringent targets for attainment with little money to make them a reality. Tutoring - which Zahawi hails throughout, yet has been plagued with problems - would not be the full answer even if it were working properly. The suggestion in the White Paper is to use pupil premium money more flexibly to target those who need extra cash the most. 

Does that not risk diluting something that is there specifically to target disadvantage caused by economic and social disparity?

“The targeted support we are talking about in the White Paper is about making sure the evidence about where pupil premium money has worked really well is followed and therefore delivers better outcomes for pupils,” he replies, adding: “I think at the moment, the focus is on every school taking advantage of the National Tutoring Programme. I want the message to be clear to parents: they should be asking their schools - are they participating in the NTP?”

‘I want to trust teachers’

Away from funding, some elements of the White Paper seem well intentioned but in danger of causing problems. For example, the 32.5-hour week that will be expected will, according to many, impact around 15 per cent of schools. More time in school is generally accepted as a potential driver for pupils to improve both academically and socially and emotionally. But is this policy really going to make any difference, when many schools claim to be just 10 or 20 minutes off that target?

Zahawi insists it will. “My responsibility is to be very clear with parents,” he says. “20 minutes’ less time per day in education is the equivalent of two weeks per year lost.”

It depends, of course, how that 20 minutes is spent. Unlike the number of hours schools open for, what happens in that extra time should be up to schools to decide, Zahawi says.  

“I want to trust teachers,” he continues. “They have done a brilliant job in working with us, dealing with the virus, with Omicron…Teachers will always look at best practice, who is doing it well, and there are thousands of schools doing it well.”

The danger in pushing this objective in such a public way, of course, is that the nuance is lost and the message reaching parents is that schools are in some way slacking off (it should be noted that Zahawi certainly doesn’t think that, and has never phrased this objective in this way). 

There is a similar danger in the White Paper’s “Parent Pledge”. This essentially amounts to a pledge from government, through a school, that if your child falls behind in English or maths, that child will receive a quality, evidence-led intervention.

Of course, this happens in the majority of schools already, and Zahawi says he simply wants to make sure it happens in every school. But the policy risks a perception that schools are simply leaving children to suffer when they fall behind. 

Is there not a risk here that the very delicate relationship between schools and parents will be made worse, not better, by making these two proposals in the White Paper rather than tackling these issues through Ofsted inspections?

“My responsibility is to be very clear with parents,” Zahawi replies. “Everything I do is about remembering who we are going to work to help, and that is every child including those whose parents don’t have the wherewithal to support their children. Or who have no parents at all. As long as we remember that, we will do the right thing, and this is the right thing - the evidence is clear on this.”

The evidence gap

The word “evidence” comes up a lot in the White Paper and also when Zahawi speaks about it. He is clear he wants to be the “evidence-led secretary of state”. But there are times, reading the White Paper, when you wonder where the evidence for the surety of the statements is coming from. For example, Ofsted is mentioned frequently in the White Paper, both as an enforcer and as a best-practice distributor. Is Zahawi sure there is evidence that it can perform those roles successfully?

“I do have faith in Ofsted,” he confirms. “And I will tell you why: when you look at the evidence, schools and teachers have had a really tough time getting their schools through the virus and the pandemic and have done a phenomenal job. And, of course, working with Ofsted, we have listened to the profession when we were dealing with Omicron and given them the ability to postpone or reschedule inspections if they felt the virus was having a deeper impact on their school. 

“The really interesting thing is that most school leaders feed back to me that once they have had an inspection, had that ability to almost work with Ofsted to take a strategic, holistic view of how they are delivering education, they have come out the other end with very positive experiences. I think some of the anxiety may rest with pre-inspection rather than when they are into the inspection and post-inspection.”

That’s a rather optimistic view of Ofsted’s status among the profession and of its actions. In February, Tes reported that Ofsted had rejected one in five requests to defer inspections (in November, it was a third), and they were widely criticised for continuing inspections throughout the pandemic. 

So, where does all this leave the White Paper? It’s a modest document in its aims - there is no radical new idea - but perhaps, with so much upheaval in education over the past decade, we should be thankful for that. Yet despite its functional objective of finishing a job already started, it presents a confidence in some of its convictions that seems to go beyond the available evidence. 

Big statements have been made about what schools are - and are not - doing and what they should do next. Pressure is now on the government to be completely transparent about what evidence it has used to come to these conclusions and how robust it is. And having refused to ask for more money from the Treasury, and having claimed so often to be the evidence-led secretary of state, that pressure will be focused very much on Zahawi himself.