The government continues to “pledge significant packages of investment” to help pupils catch up on missed learning due to the pandemic, Gavin Williamson has claimed.
Sky News understands the proposal put to the Treasury to help schools recover from lost learning during the COVID crisis was worth around £15bn, with 100 extra hours of teaching per pupil.
A £1.4bn package was unveiled by ministers last Wednesday, with the plans denounced as a “damp squib” by unions.
Image: Sir Kevan Collins quit last week as the PM’s catch-up tsar. Pic: PA/House of Commons
Mr Williamson said on Monday that the total recovery package is now worth more than £3bn, including £1bn that will be spent on tutoring courses particularly for pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds.
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He claimed the fund would help close the attainment gap between disadvantaged children and their peers.
In the Commons, the education secretary promised a “tutoring revolution” that would result in six million 15-hour tutoring courses for schoolchildren and two million 15-hour courses for 16 to 19-year-olds who need additional support to catch up.
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And he said year 13 pupils would have the option for repeating their final year “where this is appropriate”.
He claimed the evidence showed one course of high-quality tutoring had been proven to boost attainment by three to five months so additional tutoring will be “vital” for young people in recovering the teaching hours lost over the past year.
He told MPs: “Helping our children recover from the impact of the pandemic is an absolute priority. Pupils, parents and staff have all experienced disruption and we know that continuous actions are required to help recover lost learning.”
He said 250,000 children would receive tutoring this year who would not have had access to it previously, and more than 500,000 would be able to attend summer schools.
Mr Williamson continued “The evidence we have shows that disadvantaged children and those who live in areas that have been particularly hard hit by high COVID rates such as the North East of England and Yorkshire are among those whose learning is most likely to have been affected.
“We have always been clear and will continue to take the action that is required. This is why we continue to pledge significant packages of investment and targeted intervention to help them make up on their lost learning.”
Mr Williamson also thanked Sir Kevan following his departure for “his contribution to these efforts”.
Labour’s shadow education secretary, Kate Green, told the Commons: “The government failed children and young people.
“They were promised that their education was the prime minister’s number one priority but they’ve been betrayed by a secretary of state who has let them down once again, and by a prime minister who won’t lift a finger for them when it comes to a row with the chancellor about prioritising the investment needed in their future.
“I was frankly embarrassed to hear the Secretary of State proclaim that the funding announced last week would deliver a revolution – from what his government announced it’ll amount to just £50 per pupil for the next three years compared to £1,600 in the USA, £2,500 in the Netherlands.”
Mr Williamson claimed Labour had opposed nearly all of the government’s education reforms, adding that the opposition would “merely parrot what the union paymasters ask it to do”.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) has released its annual report detailing complaints and losses due to scams and fraud involving cryptocurrency in 2024.
According to the report released on April 23, the IC3 received more than 140,000 complaints referencing cryptocurrency in 2024, resulting in roughly $9.3 billion in losses. The bureau reported that individuals over the age of 60 had been the most affected by crypto-related fraud, with roughly 33,000 complaints and $2.8 billion in losses.
“Last year saw a new record for losses reported to IC3, totaling a staggering $16.6 billion,” said the report. “Fraud represented the bulk of reported losses in 2024, and ransomware was again the most pervasive threat to critical infrastructure, with complaints rising 9% from 2023,” notes the report, adding that, as a group, those over the age of 60 suffered the most losses and submitted the most complaints.
The report added that the resultant losses had increased roughly 66% since 2023, from roughly $5.6 billion to $9.3 billion. The most significant percentage of losses occurred due to crypto investment schemes, while the largest number of complaints related to “sextortion” schemes, in which fraudsters manipulated photos and videos to create explicit content. Other scams included schemes involving the use of crypto ATMs or kiosks.
In February, the FBI reported its “Operation Level Up” had saved potential victims of crypto fraud roughly $285 million between January 2024 and January 2025. However, blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis speculated that 2025 could see the largest number of scams to date, given that generative AI is making the practice “more scalable and affordable for bad actors to conduct.”
Globally, Chainalysis estimated that there had been roughly $41 billion in illicit crypto volume in 2024, with roughly 25% of the funds involved with “hacking, extortion, trafficking, or scams.” Some of the most high-profile crimes included the $1.4 billion in crypto stolen from the Bybit exchange in March and North Korean hackers taking more than $1.3 billion.
United States Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently called for “Bretton Woods institutions,” such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), to reorient themselves, a signal that the global monetary order could be shifting.
Speaking at the Institute of International Finance (IIF) on April 23, Bessent called on the IMF and the World Bank to correct trade imbalances and protect the value of fiat currencies against exchange rate risk.
“The Bretton Woods institutions must step back from their sprawling and unfocused agendas,” Bessent said. He added:
“The IMF’s mission is to promote international monetary cooperation, facilitate the balanced growth of international trade, encourage economic growth, and discourage harmful policies like competitive exchange rate depreciation.”
Bessent’s call for the IMF to correct trade imbalances between countries, specifically the US and China, coincides with a decline in the US dollar to three-year lows, $36 trillion in US government debt, and stiff economic competition from China.
The Dollar Currency Index (DXY), a measure of the US dollar’s strength relative to other major fiat currencies, plunges to three-year lows. Source: TradingView
Investor and hedge fund manager Ray Dalio argues that the world is experiencing a global macroeconomic shift that will upend the post-WWII financial order and eventually replace the US dollar as the global reserve currency, potentially with a digital form of money.
The Bretton Woods Agreement was signed in 1944 and pegged the currencies of 44 countries to the value of the US dollar, which, at that point, was pegged to the value of gold at $35 per ounce.
Eliminating complex foreign exchange risks between freely floating currencies to make global trade more efficient was the primary goal of the agreement.
US President Richard Nixon delivers the infamous “Nixon shock” speech in August 1971, suspending the dollar’s convertibility to gold. Source: Richard Nixon Presidential Library
In August 1971, US President Richard Nixon announced the end of the dollar’s convertibility to gold — formally ending the Bretton Woods agreement in a move that was supposed to be temporary.
“Your dollar will be worth just as much tomorrow as it does today,” Nixon incorrectly told Americans during his now-infamous address.
The IMF and the World Bank, which were spawned from the Bretton Woods agreement, continue operating in an attempt to curb the effects of free-floating fiat currencies on the foreign exchange market.
Bessent eyes stablecoins to protect the US dollar, BTC advocates have another idea
Speaking at the White House Digital Asset Summit on March 7, Bessent said stablecoins could drive international demand for US dollars and US government debt instruments.
Bitcoin maximalist Max Keiser argued against this plan, predicting that gold-backed stablecoins would outcompete dollar-pegged tokens due to the desire for low-volatility, inflation-resistant money.
The US dollar’s purchasing power has declined by over 90% since the year 1900. Source: Visual Capitalist
In March this year, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink wrote that the $36 trillion US national debt could drive investors to Bitcoin (BTC) as market participants start to see BTC as a better store of value than the US dollar.
Bitwise executive Jeff Park voiced a similar prediction in February, focused on the effects of US President Donald Trump’s trade tariffs.
The analyst wrote that the tumult from the ongoing trade war would cause worldwide inflation, which would cause individuals to seek alternative stores of value like Bitcoin, driving its price much higher in the long term.
The Alabama Securities Commission, a financial regulator for the US state, dropped its lawsuit against crypto exchange Coinbase, which accused the company of violating securities laws by offering staking services to clients.
The regulator cited the ongoing work between the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the crypto industry to develop clear crypto regulations as the primary reason for dropping the litigation, according to the April 23 legal filing shared by Coinbase’s chief legal officer, Paul Grewal.
The filing read:
“The SEC has announced the formation of a new task force to, among other things, provide guidance for the promulgation of rules regarding the regulation of cryptocurrency products and services.”
“Due to the foregoing, the Commission believes it would be apt to allow policymakers time to consider regulatory constructs,” the filing continued.
The Alabama Securities Commission filed its lawsuit against Coinbase in June 2023, alongside state regulators from California, Illinois, Kentucky, Maryland, New Jersey, South Carolina, Vermont, Washington, and Wisconsin.
The Alabama Securities Commission dismisses its 2023 lawsuit against Coinbase. Source: Paul Grewal
The Commission’s dropped lawsuit reflects the positive regulatory shift toward cryptocurrencies in the United States as reform at the federal level matriculates into state-level regulatory policy.
South Carolina’s securities watchdog was the next to drop the 2023 litigation against Coinbase, dismissing the lawsuit on March 28.
Grewal announced that Kentucky’s Department of Financial Institutions followed Vermont and South Carolina’s lead on April 1 by also dismissing its Coinbase lawsuit.
Despite the domino effect of states rescinding litigation against the crypto exchange, the Coinbase chief legal officer said that more work needs to be done.
“Five holdouts are still electing to waste taxpayer resources on lawsuits, and four of those have banned staking with Coinbase, depriving consumers of the right to earn on their platform of choice,” Grewal wrote in an April 23 X post.