Education spending: resourced for levelling up?

You can download the event's slides below:

• Luke Sibieta's slides
• Natalie Perera's slides
• Claire Crawford's slides

The next few years are likely to be particularly challenging for schools, colleges, universities and nurseries. There have been significant squeezes on all areas of education spending over the last decade, which will only be partially unwound over the next few years. The pandemic has led most children to missing months of normal education, is likely to widen educational inequalities and has created acute financial challenges for some providers.

At the same time, the government has high ambitions for the education sector. One of the biggest themes of the government’s long-term policy agenda is ‘levelling up’ poorer regions of the country, with a heavy emphasis placed upon the role schools and colleges can play. Further education and skills have received particular attention, with a focus on improving the quality and take-up of technical qualifications and equalising funding for further and higher education qualifications.

At this event, we will examine how education spending can be best set to support levelling up and narrow inequalities. This includes both the level of spending, how it is distributed and how existing spending could be used better to support levelling up. This event coincides with the launch of our 2021 annual report on education spending in England, supported by the Nuffield Foundation.

Speakers include:

• Dr. Claire Crawford, Associate Professor at the Centre for Education Policy and Equalising Opportunity, UCL and Research Fellow at IFS
• Sam Freedman, Senior Advisor to ARK Schools and Senior Fellow at the Institute for Government, former policy advisor at the Department for Education
• Natalie Perera, Chief Executive of the Education Policy Institute
• Luke Sibieta, Institute for Fiscal Studies

After the presentations, there will be plenty of time for questions.