PMQs: Starmer blasts Johnson on education and aid

Boris Johnson and Sir Keir Starmer clashed over education recovery and foreign aid at today’s PMQs, with Starmer warning the government’s education plans could “hold Britain back for a generation”.

The heated exchange came after the government’s education recovery tsar Sir Kevan Collins resigned in protest at government plans to allocate an extra £1.4bn for school catch-up programmes – just a tenth of what he had advised.

Taking aim at the government’s education recovery plan, the Labour leader asked the PM why he thought Sir Kevan had described it as “half-hearted” and said it risked failing hundreds of thousands of children.

Johnson hit back with the claim that the current £3bn scheme constituted “the biggest tutoring programme anywhere in the world” and said it was “based on the best evidence” that Sir Kevan could supply – a bold claim considering the catch-up tsar publicly criticised the government for not following his advice.

In response, Starmer slammed the PM for giving up on £15bn extra funding for pupils because chancellor Rishi Sunak said no, saying: “The Prime Minister rolls over whatever he says, and children lose out. So much for levelling up.

“Let me help the Prime Minister with the numbers. The funding he announced last week is about £50 per child per year… yet in the US there’s a catch-up plan worth £1600 per child, and in the Netherlands it’s £2500.”

He repeated Sir Kevan’s criticism that the plan was “too small, too narrow and too slow” and said that if the government did not change course, it would “hold Britain back for a generation”. He urged the Conservatives to back Labour’s £15bn education plan.

Moving on to this week’s G7 summit, Starmer said the UK needed “to lead, not just to host” the event, and asked if the PM would “do whatever is necessary” to make global vaccinations a reality.

Johnson took this opportunity to tell the Commons that the UK’s deal with Oxford-AstraZeneca was “Global Britain in action” and highlighted the support for the Covax support scheme. Starmer quipped that this would “sound a lot better if the Prime Minister wasn’t the only G7 leader cutting his aid budget”.

Later in the session, SNP leader Ian Blackford launched his own challenge over foreign aid, asking the PM to commit to a vote on the “inhumane cuts”. Johnson responded that people shouldn’t believe “lefty propaganda” about the cuts and said the UK will still spend over £10bn – to which Blackford said he’d never heard Theresa May, a prominent critic of the cuts, called a “lefty propagandist” before.