Ensure every school is a great school

Our verdict

• This is a promise that the government will do its utmost to ensure all schools give pupils a better-than-average education. It’s helpful here to compare UK schools to those in other countries with similar levels of socio-economic development.
• Efforts to fulfil this pledge have been severely hampered by the coronavirus pandemic which has made normal operation of schools impossible.  However, public confidence in the government’s handling of the crisis has been low for extended periods. Problems with providing resources and funding for schools, and support for pupils and staff, have been raised by many teachers, parents, unions, and education sector experts. In June 2021, the government announced an education recovery funding package of £1.4 billion. This is less than one-tenth of what the government’s own education recovery commissioner, Sir Kevan Collins, had said was required and which led him to resign in protest.
• The challenge of ensuring schools are “great” has been unprecedented in the face of COVID-19, but the government’s approach has been broadly seen as poorly planned, poorly communicated and poorly implemented, and it has provided what education experts consider inadequate funding for schools to recover from the effects of the pandemic.  The weight of evidence points to the conclusion that the government is not fulfilling its promise to “do everything we can” to make schools great, so this policy is ‘broken’.