The education recovery tsar has quit, tutoring is being outsourced and Gavin Williamson is in charge. Business as usual, then
The government’s vision to restore a year of lost education to England’s children has had the ramshackle start you might have expected. It unveiled a plan so bad that the man holding the title of education recovery commissioner, Sir Kevan Collins, immediately resigned. Its cost works out at so little per pupil that it would probably have brought children more material benefit to just buy them all a scratchcard and let them fight for the winnings.
As dispiriting as the situation is, it was foreseeable from the moment ministers came out with their strategy. Of all the myths of political communication, one of the most insulting is that the public responds really well to alliteration. Thus, “time, teaching and tutoring” was born, because we would hear all those “Ts” and think: ah, those noises sound alike! How elegant – this policy must have emerged from substantial amounts of thought.
