To save you the trouble of all that searching, here’s what the Conservative Party election manifesto has to say about education, and about environmental / climate / sustainability / global / etc education – see text in bold.
Education is the closest thing we have to a silver bullet, which is why since 2010 we have focused on driving up standards in education. English children are now the best readers in the Western world and are 11th in the world for maths, up from 27th when Labour left office in 2010. Children in England now far outperform their peers in Labour-run Wales and SNP-run Scotland. We will build on this success to make sure every child gets a world-class education and reaches their full potential.
Giving every child the chance to go to a great school
Today, 90% of schools are Good or Outstanding, up from 68% in 2010. School funding is at its highest ever level in real terms per pupil and there are record numbers of teachers, 27,000 more than 2010. The pupil premium, introduced by the Conservatives in 2011, will allocate almost £3 billion next year to support disadvantaged children to reach their full potential. Free school meals have been extended to more groups of children than under any other government over the past half a century. We will build on this progress in the next Parliament by protecting day-to-day schools spending in real terms per pupil.
None of this progress has been possible without our great teachers. We have hit our 2019 manifesto commitment to introduce starting salaries of £30,000 and are backing headteachers to manage behaviour and enforce discipline. We will require schools to follow our guidance on banning the use of mobile phones during the school day, which is proven to boost attainment, reduce bullying and support good behaviour in schools. We will attract more talented teachers by expanding our recruitment and retention premium and reducing workload. From this September, new teachers in priority areas and key STEM and technical subjects will receive bonuses of up to £30,000 tax-free over five years. We will extend the payments to eligible teachers in our further education colleges. We will always support and celebrate our further education colleges.
We will champion excellence in our classrooms. In primary schools, we will support teachers
to use tried and tested techniques, including our world-leading phonics programme and our mastery approach to maths, enabling every child to master the basics before they start secondary school. We will support children in their transition to secondary school and ensure they continue to receive a broad and enriched education during and after-school, including via our multi-million pound Music Hubs.
We will mandate two hours of PE every week in primary and secondary schools, supported by extending the PE and Sport Premium to secondary schools. We will increase funding for School Games Organisers to get more competitive sport into and between schools and work with sporting bodies to create more UK-wide school competitions like National Finals, to identify the best sporting talents.
To keep pace with our global competitors we will introduce the Advanced British Standard, a new approach to 16-19 education which will build on the best of A Levels and T Levels. We will end the artificial and damaging divide between academic and technical education which has persisted for far too long. Every young person will spend more time in the classroom, learning more subjects, including English and maths to 18, as they do in most advanced economies around the world.
For children and young people to benefit from the bold reforms we have made to education, they must be in school. The legacy of Covid has made this more difficult. We will continue to work with schools and local authorities to improve school attendance, including through more mental health support, building on our plan that is working – there were 440,000 fewer children persistently absent last year compared to the year before. And to ensure all children are getting a high-quality education, including those who are home schooled, we will legislate to create a register of children not in school.
We will work to strengthen the relationship between schools and parents, including by delivering new legislation which will make clear, beyond all doubt, that parents have a right to see what their child is being taught in school and schools must share all materials, especially on sensitive matters like relationships and sex education. This builds on the progress we have already made, having updated Relationships, Sex and Health Education Guidance to introduce clear age-limits on what children can be taught and guarantee the contested concept of gender identity is not taught to children.
We will expand strong academy trusts. This builds on our record to date, where half of all state-funded schools are now academies and over 700 free schools have been delivered, with more in the pipeline. We will further protect parents’ choice on where to send their child to school, including preserving the rights of independent and grammar schools. We will lift the cap on faith schools, allowing them to offer more places to children based on faith and encouraging them to expand. We will back Ofsted to provide clear judgements to parents on the quality and safety of schools. We are rebuilding over 500 schools through the School Rebuilding Programme, including rebuilding or refurbishing every school identified to have RAAC.
We will transform education for children with special educational needs, ending the postcode lottery of support by delivering 60,000 more school places and a further 15 new free schools for children with special educational needs. Instead of penalising independent special schools by taxing them, we will back them because we believe in the right of parents to choose the best education for their child.
Facilitating training and skills at every stage of life
We believe in giving young people the best possible start to their adult lives and going to university is not the only route to success. The Conservatives have prioritised apprenticeships after they were neglected under Labour. Since 2010, we have delivered 5.8 million apprenticeships and have created apprenticeship routes into 70% of occupations, including through degree apprenticeships.
We passed new laws requiring children to be taught about technical education opportunities, not just university routes, and have set up 21 Institutes of Technology. We will build on this by creating 100,000 more apprenticeships in England every year by the end of next Parliament.
We will fund this by changing the law to close university courses in England with the worst outcomes for their students. Courses that have excessive drop-out rates or leave students worse off than had they not gone to university will be prevented from recruiting students by the universities regulator. This will protect students from being missold and the taxpayer from having to pay where the graduate can’t.
We are committed to delivering the best value for students, so have already reformed student loans to make them fairer, meaning no one will pay back more than what they borrowed in real terms. And we will work with universities to ensure students get the contact hours they are promised and their exams get marked.
We will support the National Citizen Service to help young people build confidence and develop the skills they need to thrive.
We will deliver the Lifelong Learning Entitlement, giving adults the support they need to train, retrain and upskill flexibly throughout their working lives. From the 2025 academic year, adults will be able to apply for loans to cover new qualifications. We will also continue to expand our adult skills programmes, such as Skills Bootcamps which meet skills shortages
A new model of modern National Service
We will reinvent National Service for this century to give young people valuable life skills and build a stronger national culture. National Service will be compulsory, so it becomes a rite of passage for every 18-year-old, but young people will be given a choice, between:
- ❱ civic service. The equivalent of one weekend a month (25 days a year) volunteering in the community, alongside work or study, for a year. Roles could include special constable, NHS responder or RNLI volunteer; or
- ❱ military service. A year-long full-time placement in the armed forces or cyber defence. This placement will be competitive and paid, so our armed forces recruit and train the brightest and the best.We will establish a Royal Commission, the first in a quarter of a century, to design our modernised National Service. It will be backed by funding rising to £2.5 billion in the final year of the Parliament and a new National Service Act.