The Tories have been slammed for splashing £600million on Rishi Sunak's "pet maths project" while schools crumble and attendance falls.
The Prime Minister unveiled plans last October to merge A-levels and T-levels into a new "Advanced British Standard", which would include a requirement to study maths and English to 18. Some £600million is being poured into the first two years of preparations for the plan, which isn't expected to come into force until the late 2030s.
But there are questions about the future of the project, which has been branded undeliverable by Labour. Shadow Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson previously refused to rule out shelving the upheaval.
The Social Market Foundation think tank warned it was a "staggeringly expensive and inefficient use of taxpayers’ money" when heads are crying out for cash to solve persistent staffing problems, tackle rising absenteeism and rebuilding the crumbling school estate.
Schools are also struggling to get pupils back into the classroom post Covid, as the number of children severely absent has risen by 134% since the pandemic. But the Government has committed just £15 million to tackle truancy.
SMF researcher Dani Payne said: "The education sector has a long list of more pressing concerns and it is wrong for the Prime Minister to vault his shiny qualification reforms over them to the front of the queue. Tackling the staffing crisis would be much cheaper if he was willing to ditch his maths obsession, and instead restore teachers' pay and close the FE salary gap.
"To boost maths performance he’d be better off giving additional funding to schools, where maths and literacy took the biggest hit from the pandemic. If he wants to do best by vulnerable children, he wouldn’t be cutting the National Tutoring Programme, focused on helping children who have fallen behind.
