Neither Oxfordshire nor Wiltshire were included in the published list of Education Investment Areas designated as part of the government’s levelling up programme. Package to transform education and opportunities for most disadvantaged – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk) This may be important because these are two of the local authorities with large concentrations of military families attending schools within their areas.

The RAF will generally benefit because the whole of East Anglia and Lincolnshire are included in the list of authorities and that is where many RAF bases are located. The inclusion of Plymouth and Portsmouth will cover many naval families. However, the families of troops based on Salisbury plain at Tidworth and many other barracks in Wiltshire will still need to rely just upon the Service Children’s Premium and the Pupil Premium for extra support. The same is true for garrisons in Oxfordshire at Bicester, Abingdon and Didcot, and the RAF bases at Benson and Brize Norton.   

Troops moving from Catterick in North Yorkshire or RAF bases in Lincolnshire to Wessex will find the support for their children’s education may reduce under these plans.

Now, our armed forces may be a small part of pupil population, but they do serve to highlight the fact that there are children that don’t stay in one place for their school life. Levelling up probably needs to be more than just about geography and picking areas off a map.

A geographical strategy is anyway easier to achieve when there is a coherent basis for local government areas. Sadly, that is not the case at the present time. Cambridgeshire includes the successful parts of Cambridge, although I acknowledge that like Oxford the whole of the city is neither affluent not without need for extra funding. Was Cambridgeshire included because it is part of a combined authority with a mayor, whereas Oxfordshire is one of the few remaining two-tier local government setups, with no unitary authority.  

I wonder how Medway and parts of Cumbria feel looking at the list of Education Investment Areas? Do they feel that they have missed out?

As I wrote, in the previous post on this blog, the education measures will need to be backed up by hard cash to have any real effect. In terms of teaching staff turnover, TeachVac has provided a number of the Opportunity Areas with data about their local teacher labour markets and can do so for the new Education Investment Areas.

One thing is certain is that teaching cooking and healthy eating to secondary school pupils is going to need a rethink about staffing as within design and technology – a subject that attracts few to teaching these days – food technology is the most challenging discipline in terms of finding teachers anywhere in England.

Levelling up is as important today as ever for our schooling system. How far these moves will help is a matter for debate.