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Rachel Reeves has announced she will earmark £1.4 billion to rebuild crumbling schools as she pledges to prioritise education and childcare in the Budget.
Investment in free breakfast clubs for pupils will also be tripled, while there will be another £1.8 billion to expand government-funded nursery care.
The Chancellor said children “should not suffer for” because of a £22 billion ‘black hole’ Labour says it was left by the last Tory government.
However, experts cautioned that most of the funding would simply be enough to maintain existing programmes.
More than 400 schools which are part of a flagship government rebuilding scheme, set up under the Tories, still don’t have any builders.
Construction contracts had been awarded to companies to rebuild just 62 by this summer, a BBC investigation found.
The Treasury said the £1.4 billion, a £550 million increase on last year, would “ensure the delivery” of the scheme, first announced in 2020, and rebuild around 50 a year.
Another £1.8 billion will be used to expand Government-funded childcare, with a further £15 million to help open nurseries in schools.
Labour has pledged to stick with the Tories’ pledge to give 30 hours of childcare a week in term time to all children over the age of 9 months from September. But the party has warned the massive expansion of the childcare sector needed will be challenging.
Last week The Independent revealed ministers had dropped the word ‘free’ to describe the policy, as anger mounts over nursery fees. Under plans announced earlier this month primary schools can now apply for up to £150,000 of the £15 million. The first stage of the plan is expected to support up to 300 new or expanded nurseries across England.
Ms Reeves announced at Labour’s party conference a £7 million trial of free breakfast clubs across up to 750 schools starting in April.
But she has announced that will rise to £30 million in 2025-26.
Labour’s manifesto committed to spending £315 million on giving kids a good breakfast in school by 2028-29.
Another £44 million has been announced to help kinship and foster carers, including a pilot of a new ‘kinship allowance’, to help families with the set-up costs of fostering a loved one.
The chancellor said: “This Government’s first Budget will set out how we will fix the foundations of the country. It will mean tough decisions, but also the start of a new chapter for Britain, by growing our economy through investing in our future to rebuild our schools, hospitals and broken roads.
“Protecting funding for education was one of the things I wanted to do first because our children are the future of this country. We might have inherited a mess, but they should not suffer for it.”
Education secretary Bridget Phillipson said the funding would help “put education back at the forefront of national life”.
“This is a Budget about fixing the foundations of the country, so there can be no better place to start than the life chances of our children and young people,” she said.
“Our inheritance may be dire, but I will never accept that any child should learn in a crumbling classroom.”
However, Christine Farquharson from the highly respected Institute for Fiscal Studies think tank said that “in a tight fiscal context” the commitments “largely reflect decisions to continue programmes.”
More than 100 schools, nurseries and colleges in England were forced to shut days before the autumn term last year following concerns over potentially unsafe reinforced autoclaved concrete (Raac).
