The pre-election Budget: Time to show ambition on improving social mobility in education

This week’s Budget Statement is potentially the last chance for the Chancellor to put some meat on the bones of the Government’s ambitions for education before the General Election.

In the Prime Minister’s party conference speech last year, he stated that education would be the Government’s main funding priority for every spending review from now on. However, the Autumn Statement that followed was a damp squib for the sector, limited to just a two-year £50m apprenticeships pilot for engineering. That’s a drop in the ocean compared to the significant investment that’s going to be needed to meet the various challenges facing the education system.

So which measures should the Chancellor set out in the Budget Statement to best support the most disadvantaged children and young people in education?

An urgent priority must be investing in measures to tackle the attainment gap – the difference in education outcomes between low-income students and their better-off peers – in schools. This gap has widened considerably since COVID, wiping out a decade of progress. And it’s only likely to worsen as we navigate the perfect storm of the ongoing cost of living crisis, high rates of persistent absence and surge in mental health issues among pupils.

The Chancellor could help tackle this problem by extending the National Tutoring Programme, which is due to come to an end this summer. This has helped to level the playing field in access to tutoring, usually enjoyed primarily by pupils from middle-class backgrounds. And it’s a proven and highly cost-effective intervention for raising attainment. Research by the EEF has found access to one-to-one tuition enables students to make up to 5 months of additional progress, and group tuition enables them to make up to 4 months’ progress. Ending this programme would remove a key tool in our armoury and represent a major blow to efforts to close the attainment gap. While there are implementation lessons still to be learned, it should be renewed for the medium-term and refocused on supporting pupils from low socio-economic backgrounds who stand to benefit from it the most.

More broadly, considering the ongoing funding struggles facing the school system, there’s a strong case for rebalancing the National Funding Formula back towards schools serving the most disadvantaged communities. In 2013, spending per pupil in both state primary and secondary schools in the most deprived areas was more than 30% greater than in the least deprived areas, reflecting the greater challenges faced by those schools. But by 2021 this had dropped to around 20%, due largely to reforms to the Formula in 2018, which disproportionately reduced funding for schools in the deprived areas that most needed it. Furthermore, restoring the real terms value of the Pupil Premium, targeted at supporting the most disadvantaged pupils, to at least 2014/15 levels would help reverse the erosion caused by inflation.

It’s also within the Chancellor’s power to make a massive impact on taking hunger out of the classroom. Poverty can affect children’s ability to learn, and no child should be hungry in class or unable to study because of conditions at home. We know that families who are eligible for Universal Credit are six times more likely to be classified as food insecure than ineligible families, but there’s a cap on Free School Meals eligibility that excludes 1.7 million children in families eligible for UC.

Free School Meals should therefore be extended to the children of all families in receipt of Universal Credit. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has estimated this expansion would cost about £1 billion per year, which would be a considerably cheaper and better targeted option than the approximate £2.5 billion per year it would take to universalise Free School Meals for all children. We also want to see an expansion of breakfast clubs, as they are another evidenced-backed intervention to tackle hunger in schools.

The Chancellor’s last Budget Statement set out bold reforms to the early years system, which are due to come into force this April – if recently reported problems with providers in delivering the extension can be overcome. But this is creating as many problems as it is solving, both for the sustainability of the sector, and in terms of the impacts on equity in early education. Just 20% of families in the bottom third of the earnings distribution are eligible for the existing offer of 30 hours of early education and childcare for three- and four-year-olds, and all parents in full-time education or training are ineligible, and this policy only serves to further entrench this inequality.

All children should have equal access to an early years system refocused on education and child development. This should include a ‘core entitlement’ of at least 20 hours of early education a week, available for all children at ages two, three and four. To help close gaps in school readiness and prevent further growth of ‘childcare deserts’, more funding should be targeted at the most deprived areas. The simplest way to do this would be increasing the Early Years Pupil Premium in line with the level in primary schools. There also needs to be a renewed and joined-up national strategy on early childhood and family support expanding access to children’s centres and Family Hubs.

A strong case can also be made for creating a more progressive higher education funding system. The poorest students are often the ones left with the highest levels of debt. This cannot be right. Maintenance grants should be re-introduced in England to address this. However, students in general are also struggling with the maintenance support available to them. Overall, students living at university in England outside of London have median costs of £11,400 a year on essential spending. However, the median total loan in England outside of London is £7,000, which does not come near to covering these basic needs.

This is locking many students into poverty. In December we published research revealing 62% spend less than £37 a week on food, which is the minimum needed for a single person to buy essential food items, according to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the Trussell Trust.  Overall maintenance levels should also be increased, to better reflect the true cost of living for students. There are ways this could be done without necessarily burdening the Exchequer further, and in the coming weeks the Sutton Trust will be setting out our proposals on this in more detail.

Finally, during this election year we’d expect all parties to continue looking for ways to boost the number of apprenticeships, particularly degree and higher-level apprenticeships as a viable alternative to university. There needs to be more work done to incentivise greater supply of apprenticeship opportunities for young people, including potentially supporting employers with the costs of backfill and pastoral support. However, much more needs to be done to ensure they’re accessible to young people from all socio-economic backgrounds.

We’d want to see the Chancellor set out how the Treasury and Department for Education plan to tweak the Apprenticeship Levy, for example by ringfencing some spending specifically for young learners, and enabling Levy funds to be used for widening participation activities.  Greater support should also be made available to tackle barriers for many disadvantaged young people in accessing apprenticeships, such as support with the costs of travel or relocation, or the extension of existing bursaries to more students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

We know of course that the public purse is threadbare and there are a number of competing pressures on the Chancellor – but, instead of tax giveaways, implementing a combination of these measures would go some way towards demonstrating that the Government is willing to put its money where its mouth is when it comes to investing in the next generation in Britain. The absence of any firm commitments to improve social mobility in education might instead indicate a lack of ambition to prioritise education during the General Election campaign and beyond.