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Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots, the Spectator's Daily Politics podcast.

I'm Cindy Yu and I'm joined by Katie Balls and James Forsyth.

As we look forward to post-COVID life, the government is also looking towards how to remedy the education and shortfall that's happened during the lockdown.

Today, £1.4 billion was announced as a recovery fund for education, but it wasn't

long before experts in the field said that that wasn't nearly enough. James, how has the day played out?

So the government announced the money this morning. It's a billion pounds, but it is an open secret

in Westminster that that was not as much as Kevin Collins, the man brought

in to be the kind of government's kind of catch-up czar wanted. His quote in the press release

made clear that he felt that more money would be needed later on. And he this afternoon has

just resigned from his job. Now, this is embarrassing for the government. This is the person

that they brought in to report personally

to the prime minister in the education secretary on catch up, someone who has a lot of respect in the

education world. I think, you know, I think of one of those few people who managed going to

bridge the various highly political divides in the world of schooling in England, and he has gone. And that is obviously

difficult for the government. I think what it reveals is this tension we are going to see now,

because we're now entering into a new phase of kind of pandemic politics. And education is

further ahead than anything else on this, which is how do you clear the backlogs? How do you

get a catch-up?

Now, there are two tensions playing out here. One is that COVID has obviously taken a big hit

to the public finances. And so lots of people in government are like, we have spent huge amounts

...