Commenting on a new report by the Education Policy Institute (EPI) , funded by the Nuffield Foundation, which examines the disadvantage gap in education, especially at GCSE and college/sixth-form, Paul Whiteman, general secretary of school leaders’ union NAHT, said:

“Children from disadvantaged backgrounds are the victims of over a decade of underfunding and neglect by government.

“They have disproportionately suffered from funding cuts not just to education, but to all the wider services that should be there to help them. Successive governments have failed to invest in those who need it the most, and the result is the steady progress that was being made on closing the disadvantage gap has stalled, with no improvement since 2011.

“This report shows clearly that it is not the pandemic that has most impacted disadvantaged students but the years of government failure to address the fundamental issues creating disadvantage.

“Over the last few years, we have seen a new funding formula that directs money away from the most disadvantaged, a pupil premium policy change that has led to the some of the poorest families not receiving funding they should have been entitled to, and a failure to deliver on long overdue SEND reforms.

“And, sadly, the government’s investment into education in the last Spending Review only takes us back to 2010 levels, representing a failure to invest in children’s futures for over a decade.

“In light of all that, talk of ‘levelling up’ starts to sound entirely hollow. If the government is to achieve their stated goal of ‘levelling up’, they need to look carefully at the impact their reforms are having.”