Former catch-up tsar Sir Kevan Collins appeared at the Commons Education Select Committee this morning to discuss his plans for catch up.

He resigned from his post as the government’s education recovery commissioner earlier this month because ministers were unprepared to come close to the £15 billion funding he said was needed for a catch-up.

Here is what we learned today about what Sir Kevan had hoped to put in place:

News: Catch-up effort ‘a bit feeble’, says Sir Kevan Collins

Related: Sir Kevan Collins’ decision to quit ‘is a real blow’

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

1. More time in schools is needed

“The big bit that didn’t land and the bit that disappointed me most was the element of time,” he said, adding: “I think there’s an argument for increasing the amount of time children spend in school in order to do three things quickly.

“One is to enable lots of other things to happen, to create the space for children to be involved in a much broader range of experiences, the things they’ve missed - competitive sport, drama, art, just for a limited amount, for three or four years I wanted us to increase the time to get those experiences.”

In his report, Sir Kevan recommended an extended school day, which may now be considered in the government spending review later in the year. 

Sir Kevan said the amount of time was about “capacity in the system” but he had hoped a set of approaches could have been trialled over the next academic year.

He added that there was no legislation on the length of the school day but that the current average was “around six and a half hours”.  

2. Catch-up funding should be consolidated with the Pupil Premium

Asked by MP Robert Halfon whether the funding should be consolidated with the Pupil Premium to be more “ring-fenced and targeted”, Sir Kevan said: “I do, I think the Pupil Premium is a great mechanism,” although he added there should be more accountability attached to it. 

3. Schools should be able to plan catch up over 10 years

“I think the recovery will definitely take a number of years,” Sir Kevan said.

“I don’t think this is a quick-fix catch-up, and...a 10-year plan would be for me about guaranteeing that funding over the long period, holding schools to account for it and really expecting some significant change in that work with those disadvantaged children, starting with them very very young and giving you the sort of runway to work from the youngest, the early years all the way through a child’s education life.”

4. Less reliance on Ofsted for information about schools 

Asked by MP David Johnston about schools that were rated as inadequate or requires improvement by Ofsted prior to the pandemic, and whether Ofsted should visit schools “more quickly”, Sir Kevan said: “I think there’s a strong argument to having more regular and fair distribution of the Ofsted inspections, it’s something which I think is a useful part of our system.

“I have to say though, I think we over-rely on Ofsted as our way of knowing what’s going on in the system and we need more than that single tool. I was keen for us to get sharper at, for example, scraping and sampling data from schools and not relying on these annual bits of data or the Ofsted inspection every six years on average.”

He said in inspections you saw “the Ofsted school” rather than “the lived experience children are having”.

5. More money should have been given to recovery, with more focus on non-academic outcomes

Asked by committee chair Robert Halfon about whether he had asked for £15 billion, Sir Kevan said there were a “number of proposals” but that “a number in that field” for a £15 billion recovery package was included in the proposals.

On catch-up funding, Sir Kevan told MPs that he resigned because “it was the amount, it was the quantum”.

He said: “I think the quantum really matters, I mean everything that everyone has said, the non-academic outcomes to me, the social, the emotional learning for our children, in the current package there wasn’t really anything for that.

“And that really matters, not only for the children but it matters because it sent the signal that this was about the child, it was a recovery for childhood and not some narrow stuff we were working on,” he added.

6. More data on schools

Sir Kevan said that he did not think the Department for Education did data “brilliantly” and that he was “shocked” that there was no data on the length of the school day at the department when he first asked about it. 

“I was shocked for example when I asked the question about time, what is the length of day in the average school - we don’t actually collect that data, we don’t know. We had to start looking at websites and asking people, ringing them up.”

Sir Kevan also said there was a lack of data on lost learning.

He said when he started the recovery work, he looked at the attainment gap and a shift in non-academic outcomes.

“But when we asked that question of course we don’t have a measure for that [non-academic outcomes]. We did start exploring but I got very nervous about a new national measure, I could just see how that might go wrong.”

7. Schools should have had their own recovery plan

He added that: “There are tools and instruments and my view was schools should develop instruments and tools for that, I wanted every school to have a recovery plan for example and be required to report on those questions.”

“In the Ofsted framework, there’s a section on pupil wellbeing and behaviour and I thought that could be used as a very good way of encouraging schools, and we should use that more, we should build Ofsted to be more interested and concerned about that domain of children’s lives because I think the evidence has changed over the last 15 years, 20 years, the reciprocal relationship between attainment and social-emotional skills, it’s very strong.”