Education report card, post-pandemic

Children have been through an “unprecedented experience” of seeing schools closed and being restricted to their homes, de Souza says. They have “probably taken the biggest hit because childhood is very short.”

Nokes is also joined by fellow parliamentarians Robin Walker MP (Chair, Education Committee) and Dame Meg Hillier MP (Chair, Public Accounts Committee), whose committees have been working on related inquiries:

• Public Accounts Committee: Education Recovery in Schools
• Education Committee: Persistent absence and support for disadvantaged pupils

Petitions Committees Chair Catherine McKinnell MP is co-hosting this series with Nokes. 

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Transcript

Caroline: Hello, and welcome to Committee Corridor. We are back with a brand-new batch of podcasts for you, about life in Westminster select committees, where members of Parliament swap opposition for collaboration and dig deep into some of the UK's biggest concerns.

I'm Caroline Nokes, Chair of the Women Inequalities Committee, and the Conservative Member for Romsey and Southampton North.

We're going to try something different, this series, going weekly instead of fortnightly. And instead of one host, you have two.

Catherine McKinnell chairs the Petitions Committee, and is the Labour MP for Newcastle upon Tyne North. Together, we'll be taking turns to bring the latest committee news to you right from Committee Corridor.      

Select committees look behind the headlines to ask questions. 

And we dig deep into the issues that aren't always on the front pages, but deserve more investigation.       

Today I'm asking if the education of a generation of young people is in jeopardy. The COVID-19 pandemic closed schools and triggered learning losses among pupils. The Public Accounts Committee is warning that it could take a decade for the gap in attainment between disadvantaged pupils and others to return to pre-pandemic levels.

The Education Select Committee is holding an inquiry on persistent absence and support for disadvantaged pupils. There are links between school attendance and educational attainment at ages 11 and 16, and almost a quarter of school pupils missed school last autumn. 

Later I'll be talking to the Chairs of both those committees. 

But first, the Children's Commissioner for England promotes and protects the rights of children, especially the most vulnerable and advocates for their views and interests.

Dame Rachel de Souza was a former teacher, head teacher and school trust leader before she took on the role. And she joins me now.

Dame Rachel de Souza, welcome to Committee Corridor. And thank you for coming on the podcast today. You were announced as the Children's Commissioner for England back in December 2020, and took up your office in March ’21 literally as schools in England were reopening for primary and secondary pupils as we came out of the pandemic.

Can I ask you what your priorities were for that first day in office?

Rachel: Gosh, first day. Look, I remember turning up at the Department for Education. I'd come from Norfolk, where I'd been running a group of schools, a big trust of schools, and there was just nobody here.

But in my mind, I knew really clearly what I wanted to do. And I started on that first day.

And we were literally coming out of lockdown at that moment. Children had been through this unprecedented experience of not being at …  seeing schools closed, of having been restricted to their homes.

And I wanted to hear from them. I wanted to hear from all of them, the children of England, which is my job, that's my patch. And I wanted to hear what they needed to thrive coming out of lockdown, what the barriers were to their happiness and to them thriving.

So, that's what I did. I launched the Big Ask and it was literally a survey that went out to every single child in England, that's children in schools, in hospitals. We talked to every child in prison. We talked to children everywhere and we asked them a number of questions and they gave me their answers.

And since then, I've been working really hard to try to deliver on the priorities that they identified for me.

Caroline: Your commitment to listening to the voices of children has been really impressive. And I know that they said to you that they wanted a good education. What does a good education mean to them?

Rachel: As Children's Commissioner, it is my job to listen, but also to protect and promote the rights of children and to make sure that those in power listen to children.

Look, I'd been a teacher and head teacher for 31 years. I thought I knew. I thought I knew what a good education was. I'd given my life to it. I wanted to narrow the gap. I wanted children to read and hear the best that had been written. I wanted them to have opportunities to go on and have agency and create their lives.

But when I asked them, I got some quite different answers. So, and the interesting thing was, their answers to me about a good education were really the same, whatever background children came from, whether they were male/female, whatever religion, race, whatever background, whatever part of the country they came from, they gave me a very clear answer.

The first thing was no question, they had really missed school and thought hard about what school meant to them and what it meant not to be there. They told me that they love their teachers. I bet they wouldn't say that now, but they did at that point because they'd missed them.

So, they wanted to be back at school. When they talked about a good education, the main thing they linked it to was getting a great job. So, here's me, I wanted them reading Dickens. I wanted them reading Aristotle.

They were like, “We want a great education because we want great futures.” So, they were very teleological, they were very kind of utilitarian, when I talked to them in that way about their education.

But they also wanted to catch up. They wanted to catch up on what they'd missed, so that they could do well in their futures. There was a very clear link there.

But they also talked about education in a far broader way. They talked about the subjects they loved. They talked about the wider things that they did at school, the sport that they loved. I can't tell you how many football players, young football players talked to me about just wanting to get back to sports and their friends.

They talked about drama, the arts, the clubs, the things that they did. They also talked about school as the place where they could be with their friends, be with their peer group. And that was newly important to them because it had been taken away from them. So, all of those things came up under the good education label.

Caroline: Now, I know you've appeared in front of the Education Select Committee as part of their inquiry into persistent absence. And we've just heard from you post pandemic how important it was for pupils to get back to school, to be with their peer group, to play sport. They'd missed their teachers.

But why do we have a problem where one of the issues of our age, as you've put it post-COVID, is a persistent non-attendance at school. What's discouraging them from going now?

Rachel: I am hugely worried about this, Caroline, and I'm so pleased that you're focused on it. So, let's just put this into context. We are talking about 1.7 million children, around 1.7 million children, missing 10% of their education. We're talking about 125,000 children or more, severely absent, missing 50% of their education.

Before lockdowns, before the pandemic, about 10% of children were persistently absent. If you look at it now, we're talking 24.5, up to 27% of children have been persistently absent. That's massive.

So, when I came into [the] role, I really did make it my business to look at this. So, for the past two years, I've been using my statutory powers to collect data that nobody  else can get to, to find out how many children are there in every area, how many children are missing education, why are they missing education? What's been done about it?

And actually, going out to speak, I've spoken to hundreds of children. I committed to the Education Select Committee that I would go speak to them, find them, find the missing children, and talk to them. And I have done that.

The first thing I'd say that worries me immensely is just how overrepresented children on free school meals (so that's children from disadvantaged backgrounds), are in those persistent absence figures.

Over 30% of children on free school meals persistently absent. Whereas it's far, far lower for children from normal backgrounds. So, that's one factor.  

But when we really drill down into why, why you're not coming back, we got a couple of buckets of (kind) of reasons.

One is mental health anxiety, and that's cross-cutting. So, the mental health anxiety issue is not just a disadvantaged issue, it's right across. 

There are just some children who have found it after that sort of public life at school, [had] been withdrawn, have just found it really hard to get back over the threshold. And they are really frustrated about it, and we really need to give them the support.

And there's varying degrees of that from mild anxiety to really, really serious mental health issues. And if you look at things like eating disorders or that sort of higher-tier CAMHS serious disorder, that's rising.

So, mental health anxiety is one and one that we should really be grasping the nettle of and doing something about. I prioritise that before even prioritising intervention and catch up. If they're not there and we can't get them to school, we can't do the things that teachers are so good at.

The second bucket is children with special educational needs. Look, I've been a massive supporter and massively pushing the new SEND green paper. I'm now on the implementation board. This is a moment where we really need to grasp a special educational needs issue.

In the Big Ask survey, I've got 98,000 responses from children with special educational needs. Those who felt their needs were being met in school, were happier than the rest of the cohort.

But clearly a large number of these children aren't getting their needs met. And I think one of the big educational initiatives we should be doing, especially with the SEND implementation paper coming through, is really working on ensuring all schools and all groups of schools are skilled up to really teach and meet the needs of children with special educational needs.

We mustn't have a bigotry of low expectations about children with special educational needs. We've got to meet their needs; they can achieve fantastically, and we should be doing everything we can for that.

And then there's another group, a really worrying group that just have not come back. That group I'm really, really worried about because where are they? Those children are the most likely to be out wandering the streets. And when you're wandering the streets, you are vulnerable to criminal gangs, vulnerable to criminal exploitation.

School is as much about keeping children safe. And children are safe at school, where they're not safe in the daytime, wandering the streets. So, that group is absolutely key to get back.

Caroline: Thank you for that. You've made a really important point about safety. And when our children are in school, we know where they are. We know that they're safe, we know what they're doing.

Has the pandemic provoked any changes, any difference in the attitudes between boys and girls towards each other, particularly in school?

Rachel: So, I think that that is an excellent question. And again, one I've been pondering. I started looking at this question really on the back of the sort of revelations, Me Too revelations and the Ofsted Report into peer-on-peer sexual abuse.

And I think that was timely because again, what lots of children were telling me was that they were learning about relationships and developing their attitudes to each other in the online world.

And I think we saw what those two things, kind of the increase of children accessing and looking at social media to understand and learn about relationships, sexuality, other issues, combined with that explosion of particularly girls' experiences of really, really difficult negative peer on peer sexual abuse, raised a massive issue, I think for all of us about what was happening with boys and girls. 

I think so many head teachers and parents have talked to me about this as well. We've done a lot of work in this in terms of attitudes towards sex and relationships with girls and boys. I think both are vulnerable here.

The huge numbers of young people that we've surveyed in nationally representative surveys who've talked about having violent sexual experiences by the time they're 18, and that being a norm is really troubling.

I think lockdown cannot have helped. But I think perhaps some of these issues were bubbling under the surface anyway, with a more ubiquitous use of social media, that's influencing girls’ and boys’ experiences.

And we need to be talking about RSE. We need to be talking about what schools can  do, what parents can do, and we need to be ensuring that children and young people are part of that discussion and are able to learn what they need to learn to keep themselves safe, to protect themselves, and also to understand what normal and healthy and positive relationships are.

Caroline: And you've said it that social media was already a big part of our young people's lives, but of course, during the pandemic, it became all of their lives. That was the only place that they could go for their social interactions.

Does that perhaps lend weight to the argument that in coming back from the pandemic, in allowing, enabling, encouraging children to interact with each other in person, that perhaps the focus for catch up should be on encouraging children to build healthy social relationships and not just on closing the gap.

For example, was Sir Kevan Collins right when he said that there needed to be an extended school day, which would've given opportunities for all of that enrichment and the important RSHE, which you've just referenced?

Rachel: Yeah. So, when the country was eating out to help out, I really wanted play out to get back. I felt, and I was on the Sir Kevan Collins board, and I argued strongly that head teachers like me could catch up any school or any child. In terms of catch up its fairly straightforward. Particularly for older children and particularly for teenagers.

It's harder when you're looking at very younger children who missed milestones, particularly speech and language milestones. That was a definite key place where I felt intervention needed to happen.

I was far more concerned about children's mental health, getting children back together and making that comeback successfully. And you're absolutely right. A really good place for that to happen is school. I've always been a passionate supporter of the extended day.

And I think for me the playing out, the sports, the arts, the clubs, the doing things together was what needed and still does to some extent need to be relearned and put back together so that the learning can happen effectively.

Don't get me wrong, academic learning's incredibly important. And for agency, for a young person to be able to achieve their goals, they tell me that's really important to them.

But when I went around the country, I mean, literally March ‘21, when I did the Big Ask survey, I went from Birmingham to Sunderland, to Manchester, to Grimsby, to Scunthorpe, to Brighton, and talked to children.

And inevitably in every set of those conversations, there'd be youngsters in tears or beside themselves because they were scared or anxious about reconnecting with their friends, how to get back to normality. Just real anxiety about that.

And that speaks to the need for play for all those activities and social activities that are the architecture of young people's lives and that we needed to put back in.

And I think that's what we do need to be doing now.

Caroline: Just to give you a bit of pushback on your comment, that good head teachers, great head teachers will find the academics easy to catch up with.

So, talk to me about the Public Accounts Committee calling for faster and more effective intervention around catch up and their comment that a decade of children could lose out, that we're talking about 10 years to catch up.

Rachel: Challenge taken, there's no question that the gap has widened post lockdown. And the most vulnerable are overrepresented in that gap, that disadvantage gap has widened.

I guess I want to take us back to before lockdown. I became a head teacher. I became an academy principal under Tony Blair in 2005/6 and took on one of the worst schools in this country.

From those early 2000s, there has been a golden thread of education reform where we've really worked hard to improve our school system. And I would say from those days back in 2005 to just before the pandemic, we were seeing the gap close. Often those particularly troubled schools were unrecognisable.  

Now, there is no question after lockdown, there is a chasm again. And I would say we need to do what we did. We need to do twice as much now, and we need to go at it twice as hard. And my goodness, we worked hard for those 10, 15 years beforehand.

I am worried that education is not at the top of the Government priorities at the moment, or that's how it feels. So, I absolutely want it back down there. It's obviously important. I mean, I was really pleased to see focus on Maths. There have been billions of pounds put in, so I'm pleased to see that.

But I really want the ministers, the prime minister, the opposition, talking about education every day. If we are going to create the future that the kids tell me they want and need and a successful country - education has to be the focus. And all those things we've talked about around mental health, SEND being an increased need. We need to focus on those.

I guess what I was saying was that we do know how to do this. My point to you about we know how to turn schools around. We know how to get a year 11 to get their results. We've just got to do it. And we've got to have the political will, the national leadership, the leadership in our schools to really focus on that and do it.

Now, there are lots of things happening at the moment, whether it's teacher strikes, teacher recruitment issues that are problems we didn't have before. And they have to get addressed and they need addressing quickly, so we can crack on and do this job that we need to do.

Caroline: And a final question for you. You have personally put a lot of effort into listening to children, hearing their voices. Do you think that they should also be heard in the public inquiry into COVID-19?

Rachel: Yeah, absolutely. 

I think the impact of lockdown has only just been seen now really in terms of what we're seeing with mental health concerns, the attendance issues, and just the general impact on how children feel.

Now, the one thing I would say is in the Big Ask, 80% of children did tell me they  were happy or fine. So, I think we don't have to sort of overdramatise.

But there were a significant number of children that were seriously vulnerable. And so, I absolutely think we should be hearing from them. I actually think their voices should be front and centre of all our policies. I want to see politicians actually taking children's voices and views into account of all the policies.

Look, we're coming up to an election in a year or so. I mean, one of the things I'm about to launch is a children's manifesto. And just like I brought children's voices to Government after the lockdown, I now want to bring their preferences and thoughts about what Government should be doing and the policies and the things they need now for a better world. I want to be bringing those to parliament and to Government.

And in terms of the COVID inquiry, I think it's absolutely morally correct that we speak to children and ensure their voices ar e heard through the process. And we certainly will be continuing to do that. And we have submitted to the COVID inquiry and will continue to do so.

Caroline: Dame Rachel de Souza, I can't think of a better person to be championing the need to listen to our children. As a Children's Commissioner for England, thank you for the work that you do, and thank you for taking the time to talk to me. It's been really appreciated.

Rachel: Thanks so much.

Caroline: I'm joined now by the Chairs of two committees that have been looking into these issues in depth. The Public Accounts Committee has recently published its report on education recovery in schools in England.

Unless the Department for Education takes faster and more effective recovery action, the committee believes the legacy of the pandemic will be with us for a very long time, with disadvantaged pupils, the most affected.

It's Chaired by the Labour MP for Hackney South and Shoreditch Dame Meg Hillier. 

A big factor in attainment is attendance. The Education Committee is in the middle of an inquiry into persistent absence and support for disadvantaged pupils, hearing evidence from many different organisations. 

It's Chaired by the Conservative MP for Worcester, Robin Walker.

Thank you both for joining me today. Robin, I have heard from head teachers in my constituency about the problem of persistent absence, and your committee's been looking at that. Can you first tell us what is it and what kind of figures are we talking about?

Robin: So, persistent absence is where children aren't just missing a few days of school here and there. They're missing about 10% of sessions in school. And that's a measure of children who are genuinely missing out to the extent that it's likely to affect their education in the long-term.

We're also looking at severe absence, which is where children are missing more than 50% of sessions. And obviously that's even more concerning. And where children are in some cases at serious risk.

But if we look at the persistent absence figures, what we're talking about is a rate overall of about 20% for persistent absentees. And that's significantly higher than it was before the pandemic.

So, it is a very concerning figure and something that we want to look at all the levers at the disposal of schools, the department and local authorities for how that can be reduced and how we can make sure that we're getting more children back into school.

Caroline: And as you said, those figures have got significantly worse since the pandemic. Do we know why pupils might be staying away from school? And is there anything we can identify from the data that tells us which pupil cohorts are more likely to be persistently absent?

Robin: So, we've been taking a lot of evidence on this, and there are clearly a range of reasons why pupils might be absent for longer periods of time from schools. What we've heard is that children on free school meals, children in receipt of the Pupil Premium, children with special educational needs are more likely to be absent from school for longer.

But often the evidence that we've heard on select committees, is that it's often unmet need where either children or their parents feel that their needs are not being met in school, which means that the children are spending longer out of school.

But also, we all know that there's been an avalanche of mental health challenges post-pandemic and an awful lot of cases where children are staying away from school due to anxiety.

So, that is something that we are keen to address, keen to make sure that there is support in schools to help children to deal with anxiety. I'd say those are the two prime causes.

It's also notable that the rate of absence is significantly higher in secondary schools than in primary schools. And it's higher, still around 40% in special educational needs schools. All of those figures are higher now than they were before the pandemic.

And again, that's a major concern because certainly when I was at the Department at the tail end of the pandemic, we expected attendance to improve the faster or closer we got away from the pandemic itself.

That clearly hasn't happened. And those levels of those figures are why we decided to do an inquiry on this, why we're taking evidence from a range of organisations as to what the solutions are to get children back into school.

Caroline: Meg, we've heard from Robin about the scale of the problem, but your report had a very clear message that it was disadvantaged pupils who had suffered most from the pandemic. Why is that?

Meg: Well, obviously during the pandemic itself, I mean, there were really big challenges. And I mean, in my own constituency, yeah, I know that so many people were living in very overcrowded housing, very limited access sometimes just to Wi-Fi.

If they had access to equipment, it might be one laptop or phone shared between a number of siblings. So, that obviously didn't help. And the most disadvantaged, weren’t able to go into school. But quite a lot of people, young people, were not in that category.

And then if you add to that, as Robin has said, absence levels now are high and they're higher among the most disadvantaged pupils, they've gone up to over 10%. 

And if you're not in school, as Robin said, you’ve been missing 10% of your schooling, that has an impact.

And we've been concerned, even the Government has said, it's going to take 10 years to fill that gap. I should perhaps just backtrack a bit that before the pandemic, the gap between the disadvantaged, most disadvantaged and advantaged pupils had narrowed significantly.

Caroline: And I'm glad you've referenced how to close the gap. We know that the Department for Education has described that as its relentless focus and lots of effort and funding has gone into tutoring. Can you tell us a bit about the impact that's made?

Meg: Yes. Well, I mean, the teaching program had a bit of a rocky start at the beginning. It was sort of a Whitehall set up a program really that felt very distant from schools, and there was low take-up.

But after feedback from schools, the Department adjusted it so that it was school led much more. But there's still a problem. I mean, 13% of schools didn't take it up. So, that's an issue.

A number of schools would find it hard to find tutors in their area, even through the school-led program. And we know that schools often preferred to bring in retired former teachers or boost the work of classroom assistants leading it themselves, because in some parts of the country, it was just difficult to get… There isn't a vast market in private tutoring actually or not in certain parts of the country.

So, they were real considerations. And then the other concern is, of course, that the National Tutoring Programme, which most of the money that's gone into schooling [for]  the catch up after COVID, will be tapering off.

So, after next April, schools will be expected to pick it up directly out of their school budgets. And we know, we've heard, from heads and other evidence we've had that for a lot of schools, they're just very worried about how they can make it a sustainable offer to young people if they can't get any additional funding when their budgets are already very squeezed.

So, I think this is overall really though Caroline, and other work we've done on the committee as well. Because I think there's sometimes a feeling that we can just fix COVID quickly. And actually, it's a long tail to the challenges as Robin said, mental health as well. Socialisation of children. So, children are among those very heavily affected, and we can't expect to solve this quickly, but we do need to ramp it up for this gap between the advantaged and disadvantaged pupils, as our report said.

Caroline: And you've already spoken a bit about funding, and what I'd be interested to hear from the Public Accounts Committee's perspective is whether the balance was right with the recovery plans, and did they deliver value for money?

Meg: Well, I think at the beginning we were quite concerned. It's very sort of characteristic of a lot of COVID responses. Obviously at the very beginning you'd understand, but later on when money was thrown at things quite quickly, and it's hard.We all want to see money spent in our constituencies in our schools, but it's actually hard to spend money very quickly unless you've got a proper plan about how you're going to commission the services that you want to deliver, or enabling schools or to plan for that.

So, the department made around £594 million subsidise the cost of tutoring at the beginning of the program. And that rate of subsidy will drop. And overall, I should say, actually it is put in around £5 billion, but that's over a first few years.

And one of the things about this is profiling that funding. If schools knew they had a degree of certainty over a longer period of time, they could recruit, for example, longer-term staff, but they can't risk doing that. Well, they can, but you get different people applying if you only have temporary jobs.

So, there is a real concern for us on the committee. The value for money is actually often about just longer-term planning on financing, rather than throwing a large sum of money at short notice at a problem, which can be very difficult for schools and indeed for Government to spend wisely and well.

And sometimes therefore, you are seeing money spent, that is not as well spent as it could be. But the jury's still out in a lot of this. We've highlighted some real concerns in this most recent report, and there's still opportunity for the Government to ramp up and support those pupils.

But I think a lot of this is in the national consciousness about how long it will take to really recover from COVID, not just in schools, but across a lot of other areas as well.

Caroline: Robin, you referenced mental health in one of your earlier answers. There's a danger, is there not? The relentless focus on the attainment gap isn't actually what pupils want or need. And that there needs to be a wider focus on perhaps including, as Kevan Collins has said, an extended school day, including sport, music and arts, giving pupils a chance to recover their mental wellbeing as well as their academic.

Robin: I mean, that's got to be right. And I think the balance of what engages pupils in school is really important as well. If pupils don't feel that they're going to be able to do what they enjoy and what they're good at in school, they're more likely to be anxious. They're more likely to develop mental health problems around being in school.

And so, making sure that there are things that children enjoy doing and that will be different for different children is a really crucial part of it. Some of the evidence that we've heard around the success of programs like HAF - the Holiday Activities and Food Fund is about their ability to engage children in a wide range of activities, whether those are sports, drama, singing, dancing, music, all of these things.

And it's important that schools should have a broad, rich curriculum with which to engage children.

I think there is a potential risk, if the focus were purely on Maths and English and nothing else, clearly that would disengage a lot of children and there is a potential risk of driving them out.

To be honest, I don't know a single primary school anywhere where that is the case. And I don't know any secondary schools that don't care about their sports and music offer as well. 

We are seeing some positive developments in terms of breakfast clubs taking off more and more interest in that from across the political spectrum. More interest in in afterschool clubs and activities.

So, some of this is about where did the Government have to direct scarce resource directly in response to the pandemic. Some of it is about what will work to engage children and keep them in school over the long run. And in that respect, having that mix of subjects in the curriculum, having a strong sports offer is really important.

Just to one point Meg just made, I very much agree about the point about multi-year funding settlements being valuable. And one good example we've seen of that recently was at long last we've seen a multi-year settlement for sports and PE premium, something that many of us have been calling for over a very long period of time.

But that will make a real difference, I think, to schools’ ability to plan and prepare to have an engaging sports curriculum. And there's good evidence that actually that needn't be seen as a rival to attainment.

It can actually be seen as a support to it. Children who are well exercised and well engaged in school through sport tend to pay more attention to their studies and to do better. So, it should be a win-win.

Caroline: Thanks, Robin. Meg, Robin's just talked to us about teachers and the important role that they have. Earlier episodes of Committee Corridor have heard how difficult it was to retain support staff in schools.

We're now hearing the same about teaching staff, that recruitment, retention, workload, mental health, all the problems. Has your committee done any work on what the mood is in schools, or are there any comments you wanted to add to that?

Meg: Yes, in our recent report, we highlighted a real challenge about teacher retention. It's been a hammering time, hasn't it? I mean, COVID’s hit lots of people in different ways, but many teachers were working in school all the way through visiting children at home, trying to both teach online and in person.

All of these are pressures that we see. And obviously cost of living, a lot of pressures on people. So, this is very clear. 

And we cite in our report the NASUWT’s survey that they're showing that 29% fewer new entrance to postgraduate initial teacher trading than needed are going in, that was in 2022/23. So, just this last financial year that we finished.

And more than half of teachers are citing workload as the biggest factor causing poor mental health. And so, we need to have support for our teachers as well, because we're not going to get this next generation through this challenge post-COVID and onwards to the sort of economy and world we want to see without investment in teaching.

So, we've got to look at this in the round and make sure that we are providing teachers with the support that they need. So, we keep the best teachers because a churn of inexperienced teachers isn't doing our children any good.

Caroline: And Robin, you have the Minister for Schools in front of your committee next week for the final session of your inquiry. You've been a minister in the department for education and were there indeed during the pandemic. Do you think that the department now understands the scale of the problem? And is it different to when you were there?

Robin: I think it is a massive challenge. I think what's become clear over the last couple of years is really the long tail, as Meg says, of the challenge. The fact that this is going to be with us for some time and some of the mental health implications of the de-socialisation of children during the pandemic which are going to take more time and effort to solve.

So, it is an enormous challenge. I think the department was always very well aware that it would be a very significant challenge. But I think clearly you have to evolve the tools and the responses to that.

And to the point of teacher retention, this is also a uniquely challenging period in that respect, partly because we had during the pandemic a long period in which people didn't leave the profession.

And so, therefore, a lot of the evidence that we've heard in launching our teacher retention and recruitment inquiry is concerns about the numbers of people who are leaving in the current year.

It is right to be concerned about it. It is right to want to keep experienced teachers at the frontline. In order to do that, we need to look across the board at all the things that can be done in terms of flexibility, in terms of workload.

And that's why we've recently launched an inquiry into teacher retention and recruitment. This is a really important part of how we solve that challenge and how we meet it.

Meg was right, I think to point to some of the early decisions on tutoring, for instance needed to be changed. I well remember when I came into the department and looked at the details of the contract with Randstad, it was very clear that it wasn't working effectively. And we had to do things in a different way. But worked more with the grain of schools.

So, from our perspective as a cross-party select committee, what we want to do now, is identify some of the new approaches that may be needed to address both this massive epochal challenge of getting the best, most experienced teachers, keeping them in the classroom, and allowing them to develop in their careers, alongside dealing with the long tail of the pandemic.

Caroline: Thanks for that, Robin. Do you have any final reflections on the scale of the problem for the DfE Meg, and whether they have grasped it adequately?

Meg: Well, I think, I mean, I hear what Robin says about the change to the tutoring program going with the grain of schools. I think that was something we concluded in our most recent report, that there's a bit of a distance, frankly, between Whitehall and what's actually going on in schools.

And we need to be working with the grain of what schools know that best. They know their pupils. We obviously need some oversight. We need some support centrally.

But actually, given you can empower schools that know best, share the best practice. And the department obviously has a role with Ofsted and others to make sure that everyone's getting up to the level of the best, but actually the best head teachers know how to sort this out. They just need to be given the tools to do it. And we need to make it as little bureaucracy as possible, frankly, to do it.

But I think we mustn't underestimate the element of the challenge. And there are huge issues as we've all discussed, socialisation, mental health all of these issues will have a lifelong impact on our children. So, we have a very strong interest for them, but for wider society to get this right.

Caroline: Dame Meg Hillier, Robin Walker, thank you very much for talking to me. It's been a really interesting conversation.

A huge thank you to all my guests today. Next time, Catherine McKinnell, Chair of the Petitions Committee will be your host.

I'm back on July the seventh, when Wimbledon will be in full swing, and we'll also be talking about the Ashes and Cricket. We'll be looking at some of the issues facing women in sport. And later in the series will consider the difficult issue of violence against women and girls.

This is the fourth series of Committee Corridor. We've talked about foreign affairs, the cost-of-living crisis, securing the UK's energy, human rights, and justice.

You can find all of our past episodes by searching UK Parliament, plus Committee Corridor, and we'd like to know what you think about it.

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I'm Caroline Nokes and this has been Committee Corridor. Thank you for listening.

Further information

• Women and Equalities Committee
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