Schools

In our annual series of reports on education spending, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, we bring together data on education spending per student across the life cycle and provide analysis about the major issues facing different sectors.

The COVID-19 school closures forced children and parents to make unprecedented changes to their daily routines. Including the summer holidays, most children will have had a five-and-a-half-month break from physically attending school by the time they returned in September.

In this observation, we use data from an online survey of parents with school-aged children – funded by the Nuffield Foundation and collected during June and July 2020 – to document the patchwork of in-person schooling that children had before the summer. We also explore parents’ concerns about sending their children back to school at the end of the last term.

On Monday, the government performed a dramatic U-turn on how A Level grades are assigned to students this year. The most pressing issue now is what will happen to university places.

Prior to the crisis there was no gap in the average amount of time spent learning between children from better and worse off families, but during the lockdown a sizeable gap emerged.

Education spending is the second-largest element of public service spending in the UK behind health, representing about £91 billion in 2018–19 in today’s prices or about 4.2% of national income.