Finances of academies and all schools must be urgently reviewed if levelling up to succeed – The Yorkshire Post says

Of 12 mission statements, just one is directly related to schools and that is the ambition to ensure 90 per cent of pupils leave primary school by 2030 with the requisite skills in reading, writing and maths, and “the percentage of children meeting the expected standard in the worst performing areas will have increased by over a third”.

Why levelling up is now Rishi Sunak’s biggest test - Justine Greening

What is unclear is how Ministers define “the worst performing areas” and intend to track progress to ensure that sufficient resources and political attention are being directed at those communities whose very futures have been compromised by low attainment.

Today’s cross-party report by Public Accounts Committee – Parliament’s spending watchdog – is a starting point. It outlines a series of concerns about the state of school finances, the level of reserves being accrued by academies that fall outside the jurisdiction of LEAs and inadequate support for pupils with special learning needs.

Yet, given the creaking state of local government budgets and huge disparities in the financial strategies followed by academies, now is the time for an audit of all schools budgets to ascertain the current state of play and, crucially, where future resources need to be directed to meet, at the very least, the core levelling up mission.

For, if the current ad hoc approach is allowed to continue in addition to the Treasury refusing to support the £15bn plan set out Government advisor Sir Kevan Collins to help students catch up on lessons that they missed during the pandemic, then the term ‘levelling up’ – already derided by many – becomes even more nebulous.

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