Politics is about priorities: what do we consider to be important? I worry that Britain doesn’t attach enough importance to children and their education.
As the first lockdown eased in the summer of 2020, I was unhappy that pubs reopened before schools. I thought that said something about our priorities as a nation
An interview by Liz Truss in New York gives me no reason to change that gloomy view. During the interview, atop the Empire State Building, the PM was naturally keen to talk up the benefits of the energy price support package to be set out on Friday. That package, she was keen to say, will cover not just households but also businesses.
‘We will make sure businesses are protected from those very high prices that were being predicted and what I can say is that for businesses that are vulnerable, who don’t have the wherewithal to invest in their own energy supply, we will be providing support in the longer term,” she told ITV, adding: “And that does include businesses like pubs.”
A Prime Minister who can tell us how she’ll help pubs stay in business but doesn’t say anything about schools
That’s nice, of course. But there are organisations missing from that cheery vista. They are public sector organisations, including schools. Those schools are facing a winter that looks close to apocalyptic: some speak of their energy bills rising 500 per cent and more.
Those bills come at the end of a long spell of pressure on school budgets. The Institute for Fiscal Studies estimates that the cumulative effect of that pressure will be that state school spending per pupil in 2024-5 will be 3% lower than in 2010.
Nor have schools been given anything like adequate resources to help children (especially poorer ones) catch up on the learning and development lost during those years of lockdown.
Politicians should be yelling about this stuff. The parlous financial situation of our schools isn’t just a problem for children whose chances will be affected – especially poorer ones. Educational inequality will almost inevitably widen as school funding declines, since better off parents are more able to make up for the stuff their kids miss out on in cash-strapped schools.
It’s also a problem for the wider economy and its long-term outlook. A better educated and more highly skilled population is an essential condition of higher productivity and higher trend growth; smarter workers produce more stuff for every hour of work they do. Underspending on education is therefore the opposition of the long-term growth-boosting approach that the PM keeps promising. (Unless she plans to give Britain access to higher-skilled workers via a more liberal immigration policy, of course. But that’s a whole other kettle of fish.)
Yet right now, all of the signs are that education spending is only going to be squeezed more. The medium-term fiscal outlook for Britain is likely to be dominated by two immediate priorities: debt interest and health spending. We’re currently on course to be spending more than £100 billion a year on debt interest, and that’s before the borrowing required to pay for this week’s energy support and tax cuts. Meanwhile health is on course to consume close to half of all day-to-day departmental spending, as an older, fatter population demands ever more expensive treatment and care.
In that medium-term scenario, I fear that schools will struggle to argue for a bigger slice of the national pie. Demographics are a big driver here: the UK has more and more older voters, while its people are having fewer and fewer children. That means fewer voters directly motivated by the interests of the state school sector.
Sometimes, big changes happen so slowly that people don’t recognise them. Twenty-five years ago, Tony Blair got elected after promising to prioritise ‘education, education, education’. By the early years of this century, the UK was spending approximately similar shares of its national wealth on education and healthcare: both got between 4 and 5 per cent of GDP. Today, that ratio has shifted dramatically, and we’re spending almost twice as much on health as on education.
Demographics are a factor there, but demography isn’t destiny. We’re spending much more on health than on education because that’s what our politicians – answering the demands of the public – have chosen. Our leaders set their priorities according to what they think their voters want.
Hence a Prime Minister who can tell us how she’ll help pubs stay in business but doesn’t say anything about schools.
I’m not suggesting – yet – that the new government is overlooking schools amid the energy crisis. There is still, just, time for ministers to help them too. But I do worry that schools – and education more widely – are falling down the national priority list and will continue to decline in importance. That can only be bad news for Britain and its prospects.
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