Chancellor Rishi Sunak is turning the spending taps on, with more expected on Wednesday. Yet, however big the sums are, they’re ultimately drawn from a limited pot of taxpayer money.

Every pound counts, and where money is spent tells us about a government’s priorities.

The education secretary, Gavin Williamson, squeezed £1 billion out of the Treasury to help England’s children catch up on the several months of education they’ve missed since late March. But he must have looked on enviously at the £1.5 billion cash injection that the Chancellor has given culture secretary Oliver Dowden to support our theatres and museums.

It’s another pot of public money being spent to keep things going, from a Treasury focused on the short term.

Coronavirus: Going beyond emergency measures

But it’s now time for Mr Sunak and the Treasury to show they can go beyond the emergency spending steps needed to support the economy today, and demonstrate a capacity for the longer-term investment and strategy needed for the future. 

That’s the real test that Rishi Sunak faces when he makes his summer statement to Parliament later this week. It’s easy to be popular splashing taxpayer cash but, a year into Boris Johnson’s premiership, it is now imperative that his government and chancellor set out a cross-departmental levelling-up plan to deliver on the wider agenda.

When he became prime minister last July, Mr Johnson rightly put “levelling up” as a key ambition for his new government, saying that Britain’s problem was that “talent is spread evenly; opportunity is not”. 

Both those phrases were taken from the Department for Education social-mobility strategy, launched in December 2017, so there was a real sense that education would be at the heart of any levelling-up plan.

Restarting schools after lockdown is a moment for this government to put our money where its mouth is, and reset education strategy to deliver that levelling-up agenda. 

Education inequalities

Education gaps open up between those more and less privileged right from the very beginning of a child’s life, and are more stark in some communities than others. We know that the outcomes for children and young people who are in care or end up in pupil-referral units are also far worse than for many others. The levelling-up challenges faced in rural areas are different from those in urban areas. 

There are education inequalities throughout our schools system, which a levelling-up government must address. Not least, we need to be much better at educating our young people for the green jobs of the future in a net-zero economy. An education reset could address these issues and others within the education system. 

Properly funding and investing in that strategy is crucial. But my experience as secretary of state for education was that the Treasury simply wasn’t fit for purpose when it came to understanding how to invest in the nation’s most important asset: its people. There was always a significant gap between the rhetoric and the action.

This is a complex agenda, which needs a wide and comprehensive plan, both from within the Department for Education and also beyond it, across government. 

Acting long term

As Albert Einstein famously said: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.” If this government is to achieve more than its predecessors on levelling up, it needs to act long-term, strategically and ambitiously. Nowhere is that more important than when it comes to investing in education. 

As things stand, the initial £1 billion investment was a step in the right direction, but a lot more is needed to shift the dial on schools’ investment and represent the broader levelling-up education reset that the country needs. 

Mr Sunak will no doubt announce more economic stimuli and short-term spending to save jobs in our economy today. But he should also reflect on the need to invest in the generation he is expecting to pay back these burgeoning debts. Unless he helps to create an education system and strategy that means all our children and young people can reach their potential and then access opportunities, all he will do is hand over the same country with same unacceptable inequality of opportunity to a new generation saddled with debts.

In reacting to the £1.5 billion culture bailout, the Arts Council said it was “a very good result”. Let’s hope that we can say the same about what’s next for schools and opportunity after Rishi Sunak’s statement tomorrow. 

His education levelling-up plans must follow in the footsteps of his theatres’ announcement, and raise the curtain on a new era of investment in education and our people.

Justine Greening was secretary of state for education from 2016 to 2018. She is now chair of the Social Mobility Pledge campaign