Opening schools: Joe Biden in the White House Credit: Mandel Ngan/AFP One hundred and thirty five billion dollars. This is the size of the fund that President Elect Joe Biden announced this month by way of a ‘schools rescue’ package. As Nicole Mason of the Women’s Policy Research in the US says, “what that signals to me is that the new administration understands the magnitude of the problem.” Even accounting for population size this is an order of magnitude greater than our heavily criticised £1bn catch up fund. It shows a degree of realism about the severity of the issues facing American education in the wake of the pandemic which sharply contrasts to the lack of it shown here. Most recently Children’s Commissioner Anne Longfield has added her voice to the growing band of scepticism saying our own catch up provisions needed to be “rocket boosted in terms of the scale and the funding.”