Last week, members of the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT) voted overwhelmingly to consider all options to “avert the funding crisis”.
Some delegates at the union’s annual conference in Telford told SecEd that the current funding crisis was the biggest challenge facing schools in decades.
School leaders at the event voiced their anger that ministers have not been listening to their concerns and instead continued to claim – “like a recorded message” – that spending on education was at record levels.
However, a National Audit Office (NAO) report earlier this year warned that schools are facing real-terms budget cuts of £3 billion by 2020 because government spending is not keeping pace with rising pupil numbers, as well as hikes in the National Insurance and pensions contributions that schools have to make.
Responding to the NAHT vote, the government said that education funding would rise to £41 billion in the next year, and had never been higher.
However, the union-run School Cuts campaign website, which has analysed the implications of funding pressures as revealed by the NAO and the proposed changes under a revised National Funding Formula, has said that secondary schools face a real-terms £477 per-pupil cut in funding by 2020.
The debates at the NAHT’s conference were dominated by the funding crisis, with the union’s leaders urging members to get parents on board to campaign against the cuts.
Tony Roberts, a member from Lancaster, who proposed the lead motion, said heads and parents needed to be “bombarded with letters, emails and surgery visits”. He urged colleagues to involve parents as “key players”.
He said: “They need us to explain to them how this affects their schools and their children.”
Karen Stephens, who seconded the motion, said many teachers were not aware of the financial squeeze. She said her own school needed to make £114,000 of savings, or the equivalent of three teachers’ jobs. “They don’t know what’s coming, but it is on the horizon,” she warned. She added that some headteachers still hadn’t grasped that they would be losing money.
Ms Stephen said she had lobbied her local MP who “fobbed me off”. She added: “It’s just not good enough.”
Grahame Colclough, a school business manager and a member of NAHT’s School Business Managers Sector Council, said schools were lacking resources and that class sizes were growing “while the government is wasting money on failing ideas” such as free schools.
Delegate Stuart Beck, meanwhile, said that the funding crisis was the “biggest issue” he had faced in his 28 years as a school leader: “I can’t see how we’re supposed to cope and deliver all the things we’re supposed to be delivering,” he said.
During a panel discussion on the funding situation, Jo Yurky, co-founder of the parent action group Fair Funding for All, said that at an open day at a local secondary school parents were told that class sizes would be going up “because money was tight”.
“This is happening all over,” she told the conference. “Teachers are being asked to teach outside their specialism, pupils are being asked to print things at home, and there are crumbling buildings and old computers.
“Our children are getting less and we were never told that would be the case. The government said education would be protected and this is what we expected to happen.”
Sally Bate, of the F40 campaign group – which represents the worst funded local authorities – said it was impossible for “schools to balance the books at the moment”. She said that children with special needs would bear the brunt of cost-cutting measures forced upon schools.
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who addressed the conference on its final day, said he would reverse the £3 billion of savings that schools are expecting to have to make. He also pledged to stop the National Funding Formula reforms.
- For SecEd’s coverage of the funding crisis and the National Funding Formula, visit http://bit.ly/2pcCkgh