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Luke Sibieta, a research fellow at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, has criticised the government’s commitment to school catch-up funding saying other countries were being “much more ambitious” than the UK.
Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Mr Sibieta said:
The 1.4 billion announced today adds to the 1.7 billion that has already been announced, making for a total of about 3.1 billion on education catch-up.
A lot of that now is focused on the national tutoring programme, which (Sir) Kevan Collins talked about as being quite an important part of education recovery but it is clearly a lot less than the 10-15 billion that Kevan Collins was proposing for a full-scale education recovery, which would incorporate much bigger elements.”
Boris Johnson has said there is still “nothing in the data at the moment that means we cannot go ahead with step four” of lifting coronavirus restrictions.
“But we’ve got to be so cautious,” the prime minister added, as he said infection rates were increasing.