Conscious decisions by Rishi Sunak to cut money allocated to school catch-up has contributed to widening pupil inequality, this year’s A-level results show.
In 2021, the then-chancellor faced criticism from Sir Kevan Collins, who was appointed by Boris Johnson as the Government’s education recovery commissioner, for the “meagre measures” included in his budget that threatened to exacerbate pupil inequality.
Sir Kevan resigned his position after his request for £15 billion to boost state school education was snubbed.
Sunak announced just £1.8 billion of new recovery funding. The Government had already announced £3.1 billion of catch-up funding, bringing the total package to £4.9 billion.
Writing for The Times, Sir Kevan said: “The funding allocated to schools in today’s Comprehensive Spending Review falls far short of the amount needed to achieve the Prime Minister’s ambition that lost learning caused by the pandemic be recovered within this parliament.
“It is incredibly disappointing to see the government surrender this target so meekly.”
He said the pandemic had “reversed” a “decade’s worth” of progress in narrowing education gaps, with “higher rates of absence” from schools in the north set to leave inequalities which “will be felt for years to come”.
And his predictions have proved to be accurate.
This year’s A-level results show that pupils in private schools are now more than twice as likely to achieve A or A* grades as those in the state sector.
While 47.4 per cent of pupils in private schools achieved at least one A or A* grade, only 22 per cent did so in secondary comprehensives, 25.4 per cent in academies and just 14.2 per cent in state further education institutions.
Although the government insists that academies have driven up standards, the gap between the percentage of pupils achieving the top grades in private and state schools has widened since 2019.
In that year, 44.8 per cent of pupils in private schools received a top grade against 24 per cent in academies.
Writing theObserver, Lee Elliot Major, social mobility professor at the University of Exeter, says: “Sadly for education’s have-nots, the dials are all pointing in the wrong direction. The stark academic gap between private and state schools is now wider than it was before the pandemic.”
He adds: “For all the talk of levelling up, geographical divides have also widened: students in London and the south-east have pulled further away from their peers in the rest of England when it comes to securing highest grades.
“Yes, more pupils on free school meals have entered higher education in 2023; but this is merely a product of the rising tide of child poverty pulling more students into hardship – hardly something to celebrate.”
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