Conservatives and Labour set out education plans

The Conservative Party and the Labour Party have launched their manifestos for the upcoming general election, including details of their plans for the education sector.

Commitments from the Conservatives include protecting schools spending in real terms per pupil over the next Parliament, and 15 new special free schools (in addition to those announced in the recent budget). They also say they will require schools to follow guidance on banning the use of mobile phones during the school day, and legislate to ‘ensure schools must follow our guidance for teachers on how best to support gender questioning students in schools and colleges’. Other plans include banning protests outside schools, and expanding mental health teams to cover 100 per cent of schools by 2030. Focusing on getting pupils more active, they intend to mandate two hours of PE every week in primary and secondary schools, and extend the PE and sport premium to secondary schools.

Meanwhile Labour have said that they will recruit an additional 6,500 new ‘expert’ teachers into shortage subjects and tackle retention issues. They are also pledging to fund free breakfast clubs in every primary school, and open an additional 3334 nurseries through utilising ‘spare’ classrooms in primary schools. Labour plan to ‘modernise the school curriculum’, but say this will build on the success of ‘knowledge-rich syllabuses’. Ofsted single word judgements will be replaced with a new ‘report card’ system telling parents how a school is performing, the party says, and they intend to improve careers advice in schools and colleges. A major education-related tax policy would see VAT and business rates applied to private schools, the proceeds of which are intended to fund a number of the party’s education pledges.

Conservative manifesto: https://manifesto.conservatives.com

Labour manifesto: https://labour.org.uk/change/

We will have details of other parties’ education plans next week.