New prime minister Rishi Sunak has said he will “deliver on the promise” of the Conservative party’s 2019 manifesto, promising to deliver “better schools”.
Speaking outside No 10 Downing Street after becoming the country’s third prime minister in seven weeks, Sunak warned of “difficult decisions to come”.
He admitted “mistakes were made” by the Truss-led government, and vowed to put “economic stability and confidence at the heart of this government’s agenda”.
The previous administration was planning to ask government departments to cut between 10 and 15 per cent of their capital budgets, and 2 per cent savings in revenue budgets.
After replacing Kwasi Kwarteng as chancellor, Jeremy Hunt said last week that “all departments will need to redouble their efforts to find savings, and some areas of spending will need to be cut”.
He denied the government was planning austerity on the “scale” of 2010, and said it was “likely that cash spending will continue to go up”. But it was still “going to be tough”.
Sunak said today the Conservative party’s manifesto was at the “heart” of the “mandate my party earned” at the 2019 election.
He pledged to “deliver on its promise”, citing “better schools” and “levelling up”.
So what does this mean for schools?
1. Manifesto included key funding pledge, but it’s been delivered already
The 2019 manifesto pledged extra funding for schools. So Sunak’s promise to deliver on this is good news, right? In short, no.
The manifesto pledged “an extra £14 billion in funding for schools”. This actually worked out as the schools budget rising by £7.1 billion by this year (2022-23).
The promise included per-pupil funding rising to at least £5,000 in secondaries and £4,000 in primaries.
Both these pledges have already been achieved. (Core schools funding has actually risen by £9.4 billion this year compared to 2019, Treasury documents shows).
This is because at the spending review last year, Sunak himself while chancellor, pledged an additional £4.7 billion for school funding by 2024-25.
This, he promised, would “restore per-pupil funding to 2010 levels in real terms”.
Education groups are calling on the government to stick to that promise (inflation has meant they will now fall some £2 billion short of meeting the promise), but importantly it wasn’t a manifesto commitment.
2. Levelling up back on the agenda
Levelling up, one of Boris Johnson’s big mantras, had fallen by the wayside under Liz Truss. But Sunak has put it back on the agenda today (despite boasting to Tory party members in private during his leadership bid about diverting money from poorer areas).
The government’s levelling up paper had some schools policies, including funding the Oak national academy, setting up education investment areas and opening new “elite” sixth forms – all of which are either underway or already in place.
The only schools policy with an actual costed commitment was £5m for a new cooking curriculum and training. A pilot to inspect school standards started recently.
3. What did Sunak promise while running for leader?
The worsening economic outlook means many of the schools commitments made by Sunak while he was running for leader earlier this year will not be a priority (if they survive at all).
But pledges included a new British Baccalaureate that would require all pupils to continue to study core subjects like English and maths up to 18 years old and a two-year accountability holiday for trusts taking on the “most persistently underperforming schools”.
He pledged to explore how to use AI to reduce workload outside of teaching time and would ask Ofsted to assess the quality of physical education (PE) classes during every school inspection.
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