The school funding crisis – a warning to ministers

As we approach the government’s Comprehensive Spending Review, school funding is at the front of many people’s minds. The fact is: it doesn’t add up. Income is remaining flat while costs are rising, leading to what the Institute of Fiscal Studies has described as the first real-terms decline in education funding since the 1990s.

The cost pressures are coming from rising employment costs and from picking up the costs of spending cuts from other areas of the public sector – areas which nonetheless are essential to the running of schools, like speech therapy, mental health services and personnel support. As further welfare cuts begin to bite, these pressures on schools will grow further, with many already operating what we have described in the past as “miniature welfare states”. We should be pleased that teachers are willing to do so, but concerned that we need them to do so.