This blog post goes over the Government’s ‘Levelling Up’ white paper and gives a breakdown summary of the relevant levelling up “missions” and how this can affect schools.
The release of the Governments ‘Levelling Up’ white paper, comes with a number of references to schools and colleges. Broken down into twelve levelling up ‘missions’, emphasising the increases in academic attainment across all age groups along with focuses on health and wellbeing, with almost all targets being for 2030.
Arguably two missions (Missions 5 and 6) stick out as being particularly relevant to schools and colleges but there are several other missions which are still very much related. It’s worth emphasising that this isn’t yet law, nor does it detail how you will be asked to implement the ideas, but we hope this summary was nevertheless useful.
Described in the report as an ‘elimination of illiteracy and innumeracy’ – two highly-charged terms for those children who don’t reach EXP, so brace yourself for liberal use of these buzzwords by politicians over the coming decade.
55 new Education Investment Areas (EIAs) will direct financial support to the weakest performing areas. A UK National Academy will be set up: a free online resource service to support schools. The Department of Education will also offer retention payments to help you retain teaching staff. There is a (slightly contradictory) pledge to ensure that talented disadvantaged children have access to “a post-16 provider with a track record of progress on to leading universities” by opening new ‘specialist sixth form free schools’. (These new schools will get priority for the retention payments.)
Comments in the white paper include:
“Our reforms will put local employers at the heart of skills provision”
“Funding of courses and the governance of colleges will be overhauled in line with employers’ needs”
The government is setting up Local Skills Improvement Plans to link skills training to local ‘labour market needs’, and wants to create ‘lifetime access’ to training. It will also set up nine new Institutes of Technology (in England) to boost STEM provision.
Many of these targets are guided by economics: p3 of the white paper talks about the “potentially enormous economic prize”; an economist is the only person named as a member of the new Levelling Up Advisory Council that will provide “support and constructive analysis”; and the quotations in the government’s announcement blog are all from industry.
Going forward, we can expect a continued focus on finance in the way we report on many of these targets. This will likely lead to an increase in reporting duties for head teachers and trust leaders. The white paper promises that the government will “transform its approach to data and evaluation”, including: