The Department for Education was given different messages by Boris Johnson and the Treasury about the viability of a major Covid education recovery plan, its top official told a national inquiry today.

Susan Acland-Hood, the DfE’s permanent secretary, was questioned today about the work of Sir Kevan Collins, who had been appointed as Covid education recovery tsar at the height of the pandemic.

As Tes revealed at the time, Sir Kevan resigned from his post in June 2021 after the government announced a £1.4 billion education catch-up plan, which represented only a fraction of the spending he had called for and did not include his proposals for lengthening the school day.

Ms Acland-Hood told the UK Covid Inquiry today that Sir Kevan and the DfE had been receiving different messages from Mr Johnson, who was prime minister at the time, and the Treasury about the scale of the spending.

Mixed messages on Covid catch-up funding

Ms Acland-Hood said the DfE had been very supportive of Sir Kevan’s education recovery plan but was conscious that, because of the scale of the proposal, “we would have to be working really hard on making sure we were demonstrating value for money for the proposals, particularly to the Treasury”.

She added: “So Kevan was transparent with the prime minister about the scale of the package that he was thinking about. Certainly, from early on he talked about a £10-12 billion range that he described to the prime minister in one of the weekly notes that he sent him.”

She said the Treasury knew about the scale of the ambition, and that “in fairness to them, they said right from the start: ‘This is not realistic. We aren’t going to be able to provide that level of funding.’”

She added: “However, it is also true that at the start, the prime minister said, I paraphrase: ‘Yes, I am looking for really big, really ambitious proposals - keep going.’

“So from quite early on in the process, there was a pair of messages.”

Ms Acland-Hood said that, in her experience, this situation was not particularly unusual and to some extent “represents people in government playing their appointed roles”.

Sir Kevan resigned five months after being appointed by Mr Johnson. Under the current Labour government, he was appointed as the DfE’s lead non-executive director in January 2025.

In his resignation letter to Mr Johnson, Sir Kevan wrote: “I do not believe it is credible that a successful recovery can be achieved with a programme of support of this size.”

DfE cannot tell if pupils have devices

The inquiry today also looked at the country’s preparedness for another pandemic.

Ms Acland-Hood said that, if a pandemic broke out tomorrow, the DfE would not know which children do not have access to a digital device for remote learning.

“There would be children without access to a device, and we would need to work quickly to try and address that,” she said.

The permanent secretary added: “We do have better data on tech access. It’s quite unlikely...right now that we would know, to the child exactly, who had a device and who didn’t on the day the pandemic broke out, [although] I’m really confident that we could get that information much more quickly than we did in the previous pandemic.”

Ms Acland Hood, who was appointed in September 2020, during the Covid pandemic, said tech access was an area that was being looked at as part of the government’s Pegasus project, which is testing the country’s preparedness for another pandemic.

“There are more schools that make more use of devices now than there were before the pandemic. There are now certainly very few secondary schools that don’t make use of some kind of online learning platform,” she said.

Exam grades controversy

Ms Acland-Hood was also asked about the decision to provide standardised grades at A level and GCSE after exams were cancelled in 2020. The government later carried out a U-turn on this after the publication of A-level results sparked an outcry. Instead students were given grades that had been awarded to them by their schools.

She said that before results had been announced there had been a consensus that there should be some form of standardisation of grades.

But she added that, in fact, she did not think any attempt to standardise grades would have been found acceptable.

“I completely understand why everybody thought some standardisation was necessary, and I also don’t agree that this was some kind of tussle between people who care about fairness and people who are sort of mechanically attached to standardisation of grades as a good in itself,” she said.

“Fairness matters between years as well as within years. So caring about standards maintenance isn’t instead of caring about fairness - it’s a form of caring about fairness.”

Yesterday former education secretary Sir Gavin Williamson told the inquiry that there had been too much “group think” across the UK on the need to use standardised grades.

The inquiry continues.

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