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