The Conservative Party is set to host its annual conference and after a turbulent few weeks in education, its policies will be under increased scrutiny ahead of a general election next year.
Party members will be meeting in Manchester from Sunday 1 October to Wednesday 4 October for Rishi Sunak’s first party conference as leader and prime minister.
Last year’s Conservative Party conference came amid a period of political turmoil, with Liz Truss having just replaced Boris Johnson as prime minister and yet being only weeks away from stepping down herself.
When Kit Malthouse took to the stage he was the fourth of five people who would hold the post of education secretary in the calendar year.
His successor, Gillian Keegan, arrives at this year’s conference having faced two major political storms in 2023 - with a teacher pay dispute having ended but a crisis over crumbling concrete in schools remaining very much an ongoing problem.
Here is a summary of the main education policy issues facing the government ahead of next week’s conference.
Overhaul of A levels?
Earlier this month, it was revealed that prime minister Rishi Sunak wants to promote plans to introduce a British Baccalaureate, which would require pupils to study maths and English up until the age of 18.
This idea was previously mentioned by Mr Sunak in his leadership campaign bid against Ms Truss last year.
It also appears to be a natural next step following Mr Sunak’s first speech of 2023, which set out his ambition for all students to study maths up until the age of 18, in a bid to tackle innumeracy.
But his maths plans were criticised by school leaders who warned that there were not enough maths teachers to fulfil the prime minister’s goal.
And the idea of a British Baccalaureate was quickly dismissed as a “sketchy slogan” by union leaders last week because of the lack of detail on how the change would come about. It is expected that we will hear more about Mr Sunak’s vision in the days ahead.
The key questions posed are: will such a baccalaureate replace or somehow sit alongside the existing A-level and T-level qualifications? And how would the workforce to deliver such a change be found?
Private schools to become an election dividing line
Labour may have been accused of performing a U-turn over not ending the charitable status of independent schools, but its plans for the private sector are still likely to be an issue that Conservatives will want to raise.
Yesterday, Mr Sunak accused Sir Keir Starmer of wanting to “punish” the parents of private-school pupils and stoking a “class war” with Labour’s pledge to charge VAT on school fees.
The prime minister, who was privately educated, said the opposition would be “clamping down” on the aspirations of parents who work “really hard” to send their children to independent schools with its policy.
Sir Keir has insisted his party is not launching an “attack” on private schools by removing some of the tax breaks they have currently.
Labour plans to scrap the 20 per cent VAT tax relief that is currently applied to school fees and end the business rates relief from which independent schools currently benefit.
Education catch-up
One of the most important post-Covid challenges for the education sector has been ensuring that children catch up with the learning that they lost over the pandemic.
The National Tutoring Programme (NTP) was designed as the government’s flagship catch-up scheme to achieve this aim.
Although the DfE has said it will fund half of schools’ tutoring costs next year under the NTP, the scheme has had a low-take up owing to subsidy rules and tight budgets, with tutors reporting running lessons for “ghost pupils”.
Could the party look to do more to address this issue ahead of next year’s election?
Attendance crisis
Another major impact of the Covid pandemic has been the rise in persistent absence, which is now double the pre-pandemic rate, according to the latest figures.
The government has just announced that it is expanding its attendance hubs programme as it looks to address the issue.
But it is coming under pressure to do more, including creating a register for children not in school. The cross-party Commons Education Select Committee has urged the government to introduce legislation to create this register - something it had planned to do through its Schools Bill before it was ditched last year.
If it decides to do this, the party conference will provide a stage to announce it - but the question remains over whether it will find time in its parliamentary agenda to deliver this over the next 12 months, when both the government and the opposition party are on a general election footing.
RAAC questions
The most urgent problem of recent weeks has been the RAAC crisis, after three building failures in the summer led to a dramatic change in the government’s approach to managing this risk in schools. Days before the start of term, more than 100 schools were advised to close buildings where RAAC had been confirmed.
The government remains under mounting pressure to provide clarity on funding for dealing with concrete, with some schools already having spent thousands to make buildings safe.
Despite promising to cover all costs related to making school buildings with RAAC safe, the DfE is yet to release details on how much money will be available to cover the capital costs of mitigating and repairing, or how it will be allocated.
There are also unanswered questions on how long it will take to survey all schools with suspected RAAC and in what timeframe the government expects to resolve all RAAC issues across the school estate.
Mr Sunak also personally faced criticism after a former top civil servant accused him of halving the number of schools scheduled to be rebuilt during his time as chancellor.
Workforce strategy changes
Recruiting and retaining staff has been another significant issue for the education sector this year, after the government failed to meet its initial teacher training (ITT) recruitment targets for 2022.
The government is set to launch a refresh of its teacher recruitment and retention strategy, last updated in 2019, amid signs that the crisis is deepening.
Widespread industrial action also brought these issues further into the spotlight after a long-running dispute over pay and months of strike action by teachers.
A 6.5 per cent pay rise for teachers in England was agreed by the government from September this year.
Mr Sunak said the government would not borrow more money to fund the rise, and the DfE confirmed that it will not take money from frontline services to meet the increase.
Main stage and the fringes
The two keynote speeches to look out for at the conference are from Ms Keegan, who is scheduled to address the conference on Monday afternoon, and from Mr Sunak, whose speech will close the conference on Wednesday.
However, a party conference is about much more than what happens on the main stage. There are a series of education fringe events happening at the conference - some reflecting the government’s agenda and others raising pressing problems from the perspective of schools.
On Sunday evening, delegates will have the choice of attending a Policy Exchange-run session on teaching maths effectively from 11 to 18, or one run by the Association of School and College Leaders, the NAHT school leaders’ union and the NEU teaching union, which will ask the question: does England’s education system have the workforce it needs?
Other sessions being held at the conference include the Education Policy Institute and ASCL hosting an event on Monday about whether it is time to end single-word Ofsted judgements.
On the same day, the EPI and the Ambition Institute will host a session asking if teacher CPD reform is the most significant education accomplishment of the Conservative government.
