Although no one voted for it, and there have been no street-campaigns demanding it, education in England has been systematically defunded in a comparative sense over the last 20 years under all shades of government.<\/p>\n
Twenty years ago, Britain devoted the same share of national wealth to funding education as to healthcare. Today, total health spending is roughly double the education budget. \u00a0Writing in The Times<\/a><\/em>, James Kirkup, Director of the social market foundation, says: \"voters don\u2019t seem to mind, or notice\". \u00a0Maybe they don't seem to mind because they haven't noticed. \u00a0No one ever seems to stand on their doorsteps to clap for teachers.<\/p>\n The Ipsos Issues Index<\/em><\/a>, which surveys public concerns, recently found that just 8 per cent of the public considered education to be a high priority. \u00a0Kirkup says that\u2019s the lowest since 1984. \u00a0<\/span>Kirkup also says that if we want a case study in how we are focused on the wrong topics, consider the DfE report\u00a0Key stage 4 performance 2022.<\/em><\/a>\u00a0 These data show that the gap between the GCSE results of children from low-income homes and their classmates from better-off backgrounds is at its highest level since 2012.<\/p>\n So poverty begets poverty, and the soft bigotry of low expectations continues unconstrained.<\/p>\n Will the new team at the DfE do any better? \u00a0Will the opposition wake up? \u00a0Will ...? \u00a0I do hope so, but fear I know the response.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Although no one voted for it, and there have been no street-campaigns demanding it, education in England has been systematically defunded in a comparative sense over the last 20 years under all shades of government. Twenty years ago, Britain devoted...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":237,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8215","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment","category-news-and-updates"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8215","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/237"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8215"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8215\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8215"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8215"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8215"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}