With Parliament dissolved and the election soon upon us, I thought it would be helpful to take a look at the three main Parties key education pledges which were published this week.
Conservative Party education pledges
- End the ban on selective schools and continue the free schools programme, aiming to build 100 new ones each year
- Prohibit councils from creating any new places in schools that have been rated either Inadequate or Requires Improvement
- Ask universities and independent schools to help run state schools
- Increase overall schools budget by £4bn by 2022 and ensure no school is worse off as part of the new funding formula
- Open a specialist maths school in every major city in England
- Introduce a curriculum fund for developing knowledge-rich materials
- Expect 75% of pupils to have entered EBacc subjects by the end of the next parliament, with 90% by 2025
- Offer forgiveness on student loan repayments for teachers to help retain them within the profession
- Create a jobs portal for schools to advertise vacancies to reduce costs and help with recruitment
- Offer free school breakfast to all primary school pupils and scrap universal infant free school meals
- Introduce mental health first aid training for teachers in all schools
- Replace rules preventing the establishment of new Roman Catholic schools
- Create more nurseries by introducing the presumption that all new primary schools should include one
- Deliver a world-class technical education by replacing 13,000 existing technical qualifications with the new T-levels
Labour Party education pledges
- Create a unified National Education Service (NES) as one of the “central institutions of fairness” for the 21st century
- Introduce a fairer funding formula which would leave “no school worse off”
- Reduce class sizes to less than 30 pupils for all 5, 6 and 7 year olds
- Introduce free school meals for all primary school children
- Abandon baseline assessments and review KS1 and KS2 SATs
- End the public sector pay gap and consult on introducing teacher sabbaticals and placements with industry
- Give teachers “more direct involvement” in the curriculum
- Reduce “monitoring and bureaucracy”
- Reintroduce national pay bargaining for teachers
- Undo the requirement for schools to pay the apprenticeship levy
- Extend schools-based counselling to all schools to improve children’s mental health
- Deliver an inclusive SEND strategy and embed it more substantially into training for all school staff
- Extend free childcare to 30 hours for all 2 year olds
- Scrap tuition fees in England
- Reintroduce maintenance allowances
Liberal Democrats Party education pledges
- Scrap grammar schools plans and devolve all capital money for new school spaces to local authorities
- Introduce a fairer National Funding System with a protection for all schools
- End the 1% cap on teachers’ pay rises
- Extend the free school meal programme to all primary school pupils
- Introduce 25 hours of high quality CPD by 2020, rising to 50 hours by 2025
- Tackle teacher workload by reforming Ofsted inspections and focusing on an evidence-based approach
- Allow Ofsted to inspect academy chains
- Introduce a curriculum entitlement – a slimmed down core national curriculum
- Prioritise primary progress measures instead of floor thresholds and work with the profession to reform tests at age 11
- Provide training to all teaching staff to identify mental health issues
- Amend the Ofsted inspection framework to include promoting wellbeing as a statutory duty of schools
- Improve links between employers and schools, encouraging all schools to participate in employment and enterprise schemes