This week’s GCSE results, alongside last week’s A-Level results, show a resilient cohort of young people of whom we can be proud, after so much education disruption during Covid. But they also show concerning evidence of a continuing education divide, with London students getting a significantly higher percentage of top GSCE grades, at 28.4%, compared to those in the bottom-placed region, the north-east, with just 17.6%. It’s a similar picture for other regions in the north, and shows a gap getting bigger since last year.
Unprecedented levels of unauthorised school absences point to ongoing growing challenges ahead. We are seeing the generational impact of Covid on education inequalities and they fall disproportionately on the most disadvantaged people and places across our country. Doing nothing is not an option. Even before Covid, the 2019 Conservative Manifesto promised to “level up” Britain, committing the government to turbocharging progress closing existing education inequalities.
So the education recovery plan that ministers asked the widely respected education expert Sir Kevan Collins to develop in 2021 was vital.
In its decision to reject that plan just months later, not for being wrong, but for being too expensive, the leadership of the Conservative party showed a breathtaking level of short-termism.
It also showed a profound ignorance of the education recovery plan’s social, economic and political need. Ignorance of the social need because its impact would so inevitably fall on the most disadvantaged. Ignorance of the economic need because in a 21st-century UK economy, driven by human capital and facing an acute skills shortage, a country with no long-term talent strategy is the definition of a country with no long-term economic strategy. And ignorance of the political need, because as this week’s GCSE results illustrate, so many schools on the wrong side of the education inequality divide are disproportionately in the northern “red wall” seats crucial for the Conservative party’s electoral fortunes.
The decision’s scarring impact will be long term and wide ranging as we fail to travel down the better path Britain could have had – successful businesses never established, patents and intellectual property never developed, groundbreaking research never carried out. Above all, its impact is the unacceptable prospect of lives off track that, with a better start, could have instead been on track, fulfilled and contributing to a wider community and country. The consequential damage to public finances far outweighs the alternative “cost” of a different, more positive decision to back the education recovery plan and invest in our nation’s young talent. This year’s GCSE and A-level results, with the regional and class-driven disadvantage they highlight, show we need the opposite of a watered-down Covid education recovery plan.
Rather, they show the plan needs strengthening even further to close both new Covid education inequalities and the pre-existing education gaps already there. The longer we leave it, the more ambitious and radical we will need to be, as more crucial time is lost.
This is not just other people’s children, or another generation that is affected. In holding back Britain’s future talent base we hold back our whole country. It affects all of us, so we all have a stake in fixing this, whether in politics, business or wider society.
Weak social mobility is one of our great generational challenges and tackling educational inequality is at its heart. As someone who grew up in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, with my own exam results once part of those northern education statistics, I can never accept that regional educational inequalities gaps cannot be closed. They can. Ultimately it’s a question of political will and vision. And who has it.
• Justine Greening was Conservative education secretary from 2016 to 2018
