Given the economic challenges facing the country, it is understandable that this Budget has prioritised measures to bring down the cost of living and strengthen growth.
But children and young people from the lowest income households are struggling now: starting school behind their peers, unable to access timely SEND support, and too often leaving school without a destination. While there were some welcome measures, we hope forthcoming policy announcements will set out a stronger and more comprehensive package of support for education and young people.
Headlines for education and young people
The Budget set out funding for a small number of new measures:
£15 million of funding over three years for access to books for young children, helping improve their readiness for school
£100 million over two years to expand local apprenticeship services so that all current mayors can deliver tailored local support that helps young people access apprenticeships and supports employers to create apprenticeship opportunities
Funding to the Department for Education will increase by £60 million per year to contribute to the cost of new PE & Sport partnerships, due to be rolled out in England in 2027
There were also encouraging announcements about the creation of Preventative Departmental Expenditure Limits which will protect the funding needed to support preventative public services, investing to avoid a crisis rather than spending more to respond.
Local apprenticeships
With nearly one million young people not in education, employment or training (NEET), we welcome the £100 million commitment to expand Mayoral Apprenticeship Brokerage Pilots to all 14 mayoral strategic authorities, which enhances their role in skills and employment support. We have long argued that many of the challenges young people face are best solved within and by communities. Giving mayors the means to connect young people directly with local employers is an encouraging sign of the place-based, joined-up approach we need.
We also welcome the requirement that at least 3% of the workforces of all large government construction and infrastructure projects must be apprentices in future. This echoes the recommendation in our Report Card for public contracts to have a stronger social value commitment to employing young people, such as through apprenticeships.
However, an apprenticeship can only be a first rung if young people reach it ready to climb. Six in ten young people who are NEET have never had a job, and the journey to becoming NEET often begins long before 16: in the early years, in school, and in the gaps between services. Investment in routes into work must be matched by action on the root causes of disadvantage, so that fewer young people fall through those gaps in the first place. We hope that the measures which follow the Milburn Review will put in place the other forms of support across the education journey that young people need to succeed.
The Budget also reconfirms the Youth Employment and Skills Package, including the Youth Jobs Grant and apprenticeship hiring payment. As we set out in our Report Card, we would have liked to see additional targeting measures added to ensure that these schemes primarily help young people facing the greatest barriers to employment, and we hope to see this in the government's response to the Milburn Review.
New funding for early literacy
We welcome the £15 million for organisations that improve access to books for children in their early years, and we were pleased to hear the chancellor acknowledge the FEA member BookTrust. Children from low-income households can find it harder to access books, and literacy charities play a vital role in putting books in their hands. This can not only help children enter primary school at a good level of development, but also ensure that babies and young children experience the joy and wonder that reading and books bring. This funding will stretch over three years, helping to sustain the legacy of the National Year of Reading.
Literacy Link, one of our thematic collaborations, brings together organisations working to ensure all children can become readers. Access to books is one important route to achieving this, and Literacy Link strongly supports this new funding.
Fiscal devolution
We are also pleased to see the fiscal devolution roadmap set out a clear direction for giving mayors greater control over the funding of local services. Done well, this could bring the services around young people together in a way a centralised system has struggled to do. But this outcome is not guaranteed: it depends on investment in the connective tissue that brings local stakeholders together. The work of our Place-based Collaboration Partnerships in South Yorkshire, West Midlands and Liverpool City Region shows the important leadership role mayoral strategic authorities can play in joining up services, and further decision-making powers and fiscal freedoms could support more of this, provided the financial settlement is sustainable and well-targeted.
The government has promised that a radical rewiring of the state will begin soon. We are optimistic that further, deeper devolution could create better conditions in which coordinated support can empower children and young people from low-income households. We urge the government to make tackling educational inequity a through line in these reforms. This will need to be backed with further investment, capacity and expertise that makes joined-up working possible.
