Fair Education in 2024: Priorities for a New Government

Strong education outcomes for children from all backgrounds are essential to taking on the world’s biggest challenges. In 2024 education outcomes remain deeply correlated with socioeconomic background and many children are not provided opportunities to fulfil their potential.

Following the result of the General Election and the news that Keir Starmer and the Labour Party has formed a new Government, we’re publishing Fair Education in 2024: Priorities for a New Government.

In this document we outline our Fair Education Priorities, which provide policy recommendations that would tackle both the causes and the symptoms of educational inequality and ensure that no child’s access to high quality education is restricted due to the income of their parents, the colour of their skin, their SEND status, the area they live in or which school they go to.

Our Fair Education Priorities

Summary of recommendations

    • Reduce workload and stress through an accountability system that values inclusion and rewards the complex work of serving low-income communities. 

    • Make teaching more sustainable and competitive with other professions.

    • Build a more diverse workforce through inclusive practice.

    • Fund schools to pay staff fairly.

    • Develop essential skills and physical and emotional health alongside academic and foundational skills, with a universal framework to monitor progress.

    • Collect, across agencies, comprehensive data on the wellbeing of young people, so local governments, schools, the third sector, and funding bodies can better understand where investment is needed.

    • Continue to fight the learning loss of the pandemic through targeted, high-quality, 1-1 and small-group tuition

    • Invest in the teacher training, infrastructure and hardware required to close the digital divide, so schools can adapt to technological developments at speed

    • Commit to uphold children's right to participate by establishing processes to meaningfully engage young people from all backgrounds in decisions affecting them and their education.  

    • Build a workforce that can deliver high quality early years provision.

    • Make high quality early childhood education and care accessible and affordable for every family, including those whose children have special educational needs.

    • Increase strategic focus on learning from birth in the home.

    • Build long-term strategies for adequately funding and delivering services that support families in need.

    • Enable early identification and support for children with SEND through funding, guidance, and collaboration across services.

    • Adopt a joined-up approach at national and local levels, including shared outcomes and the scaling up of Family Hubs or another single point of contact for children and families.

    • Ensure there is sufficient funding, from early years to post-16, targeted toward lessening the impacts of poverty on educational outcomes.

As the new Government takes shape and policies are formed, we’re uniting behind these key priorities, built on the collective knowledge and expertise of our members.

We know that this is just a starting point. While we were encouraged by many of Labour’s Manifesto commitments, we face significant challenges and there is so much work for all of us to do to tackle educational inequality. We believe that the solutions we’ve outlined will bring us closer to a world in which no child’s success is limited by their socioeconomic background.  

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