At last, finally, there it was. During the Autumn Budget speech, the announcement from Rachel Reeves of more money.
Core schools budget up by £2.3 billion. £300 million more for further education. A £1 billion uplift in funding for SEND provision (though it would later emerge that this would be coming out of that same £2.3 billion). And perhaps most emblematic of all, £6.7 billion of capital investment into the DfE, plus an additional £2.1 billion earmarked for school maintenance improvements.
Memories of the Building Schools for the Future investment programme during the Blair/Brown years are evidently still fresh in the minds of today’s Labour Ministers. Whether they’ll manage to leave a similar legacy remains to be seen – but at the very least, they can now point to a sharp contrast between their policy ambitions and the response last year of Rishi Sunak’s administration, when the appalling optics of the RAAC crisis in school buildings generated widespread public condemnation.
The next big indication of how far the DfE has travelled will be the recommendations of Professor Becky Francis’ wide-ranging curriculum and assessment review, due in 2025. It’s still far too early to say whether they’ll pave the way for a dramatic overhaul of current arrangements comparable to Michael Gove’s education reforms – but would the wider profession actually welcome that if they do?
“The next big indication of how far the DfE has travelled will be the recommendations of Professor Becky Francis’ wide-ranging curriculum and assessment review.”
Given what appears to be an increasingly fragmented party political landscape, not to mention the Tories’ lurch in electoral fortunes between 2019 and 2024, it’s not unthinkable that the pendulum could swing back the other way come 2029 – or even sooner, as the case may be.
Lest we forget, one of the core foundations of Finland’s widely admired education system is how the country’s Ministry of Education and Culture has benefited from a decades-long consensus between parties on how it should be run and what its priorities ought to be. The result? Long-term stability, consistency, and the conditions needed for new ideas and proposals to be carefully implemented, analysed and evidenced over time.
Mind you, writing these words in the immediate aftermath of Donald Trump’s decisive victory in the US general election, we might soon get to see what happens when an advanced democracy decides to do away with federal oversight of education altogether. It’s certainly shaping up to be an interesting latter half of the decade, right enough…
Enjoy the issue,
Callum Fauser – Editor
