Recovery plan for post-Covid education falls woefully short

Editorial: Helping pupils make up for lost time will cost money – much more money than the £50 per head that has been thrown as a sop to the state sector

Secretary of state for education Gavin Williamson (Getty)

In an excruciating exchange on the Today programme on Wednesday morning, the secretary of state for education, Gavin Williamson, made a fool of himself by lapsing into professional Yorkshireman mode. He declared that for folk where he comes from, £1.4bn is a lot of money (though it would have been more effective if he’d said “brass”).

True enough, and ’appen it is, but all t’experts agree that it equates to about £50 per pupil in England. And even for a son of God’s Own County that’s a bit tight.

Indeed, Mr Williamson’s spin doctors have been making no secret of the fact that this son of York has been lobbying the Treasury hard for about 10 times the sum he eventually managed to extract from the chancellor. Although Mr Williamson has generally displayed poor judgement (and worse presentational skills) in his unhappy time in charge of schools, he is surely right to at least try to secure sufficient funding for a long-term post-pandemic recovery plan for education.