The catch-up funding pledged by the government for the whole of the next academic year amounts to little more than the cash spent on the month-long Eat Out to Help Out scheme, new analysis shows.

Last week the Department for Education came under fire for announcing an education recovery package worth less than a tenth of the £15 billion that ministers had hoped to secure from the Treasury.

The general secretaries of the two main school leaders’ unions both condemned the package, criticising the government for its “lack of ambition” in education.

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And Sir Kevan Collins subsequently resigned as the government’s education recovery commissioner, blasting the package as a “half-hearted approach” that “risks failing hundreds of thousands of pupils”.

Now the Education Policy Institute (EPI) has calculated that an entire year of the catch-up funds will amount to only slightly more than the government’s investment in its flagship scheme to support restaurants, cafés and pubs in August 2020.

The EPI found that, under the current recovery programme, funding for the 2021-22 academic year will be worth around £984 million.

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This compares with the £840 million invested in the chancellor’s Eat Out to Help Out scheme, which ran for just a month. It means that the hospitality package is more than ten times bigger than what education catch-up will get in a single month next year.

The think tank previously deduced that the £1.4 billion catch-up package announced last week was equal to around £50 extra per pupil per year.

After factoring in the £1.7 billion of education recovery cash announced prior to the £1.4 billion package, the total level of funding committed over four years works out at £310 per pupil, the EPI found.

Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said the research suggested that “the government thinks that children’s education is less important than measures to support the hospitality industry”.

And Paul Whiteman, general secretary of school leaders’ union the NAHT, said: “By every measure, this is a low-cost option when what pupils deserved was something first-class.”

Labour will today seek to heap pressure on Boris Johnson in the Commons by asking Conservative MPs to vote for an opposition motion calling for him to bring forward a more ambitious plan.

Though not binding for the government, Labour hopes the motion will highlight a series of “failures”, including on free school meals and the exams fiasco.

Shadow education secretary Kate Green said: “This catalogue of chaos makes a mockery of the prime minister’s claim that education is a priority.

“Boris Johnson has not lifted a finger to secure the investment in children’s futures his own education expert said is needed, announcing a recovery plan that is totally insufficient to help every child bounce back from the pandemic.

“Conservative MPs will have the chance to vote with Labour today and finally commit to ambitious plans to invest in our children’s futures.”

David Laws, former schools minister and executive chairman of the EPI, said: “Learning losses over the last year in England have been very significant, and require a recovery package of evidence-based policies supported by adequate finance from the government.

“The £1.4 billion package of support announced last week is not of adequate size and appears to be only a tenth of what was proposed by the government’s own education recovery commissioner.

“Last year the chancellor spent £840 million in just one month on his Eat Out to Help Out scheme. It is striking that in one month the government spent almost as much subsidising meals in pubs and restaurants as it is now proposing to spend to fund education recovery over one full year for around 9 million children.

“The next school year should be a year of education recovery. For this, schools and colleges will need a better-funded plan which gives them a realistic chance to catch up on the lost learning.”

A Department for Education spokesperson said: “We have committed to an ambitious and long-term education recovery plan, including an investment to date of over £3 billion and a significant expansion of our tutoring programme, to support children and young people to make up for learning lost during the pandemic.”