Ex-education tsar Kevan Collins brands Government Covid catch-up plan for pupils 'feeble'

Kevan Collins resigned as education recovery commissioner in a row over lack of catch-up funding

The country’s response to the education crisis caused by the pandemic has been “feeble”, the former school catch-up Tsar has said.

Sir Kevan Collins, who resigned as education recovery commissioner in a row over lack of catch-up funding, gave evidence on Tuesday morning to MPs.

He warned that compared to other countries, our response to the impact of Covid on children has been “quite frankly, a bit feeble.”

He also said he was “disappointed” to have to resign, and said what dismayed him the most was that his plan to extend the school day was not taken up.

Speaking to the education committee of MPs, he said children have suffered from significant learning loss which is still ongoing, which will also harm their future earnings and the economy, as well as causing damage to their mental health and wellbeing.

He warned there has been “not enough competitive sport, not enough activity, not enough socialisation and music and drama and art…not enough play in the early years….Our country has responded in a way compared to some others which quite frankly is a bit feeble.”

He said the “scale of the shock” requires a “massive national effort to recover.”

He added: “I worry that it’s not a bit of tutoring in the corner - it’s actually a fundamental approach the school needs to take…that’s why I was keen to see a whole school effort around time and around teaching and tutoring, not a narrow, auxiliary attention to one particular activity that if we are not careful gets put to a teaching assistant at the back of a class.”

Sir Kevan resigned earlier this month saying the government’s funding plan of £1.4billion over three years was not enough.

Sir Kevan confirmed on Tuesday that his plans would have cost around £15billion.

He said he was most disappointed by the government not extending the school day by 30 minutes.

He said this would have given time for tutoring to take place, instead of children being taken out of lessons for it, and also for competitive sport, drama and art to take place.

He said he wanted to increase the time children are in school over a period of three to four years, to enable them to catch up.

He said: “I was very disappointed, obviously, that I had to resign. The proposal that came forward just wasn’t enough to deliver the kind of recovery we need.

“The big bit that didn’t land and the bit that disappointed me the most was the element of time. I think there’s an argument for increasing the amount of time children spend in school.”

He said the average school day is 6.5 hours and he wanted to immediately raise all schools to the average, which would have meant 10,000 schools increasing their days. At the same time he wanted to trial adding an extra half hour on top of that.

Sir Kevan also said he was “shocked” that the government did not have information about the length of the average school day, adding there are only 3,500 secondary schools so it should not be too difficult to keep track of. He said data collection from schools “is not something we do brilliantly.”

He added: “I was shocked when I asked the question about time – what is the length of school 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. It’s only three and a half thousand secondary schools, it’s not that big. There’s a lot of information about the system that we don’t have at hand, which we should, by collecting it and using analytics to drive our decision making.”

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