Dan McAllister is a teacher at a secondary school in South Yorkshire. This is not his real name, because he is worried about the implications for his job if he talks to the Guardian about the financial crisis facing his school. Before Easter, he and his colleagues were summoned to a staff meeting to be told that their oversubscribed academy, rated outstanding by Ofsted, was facing a budget shortfall of £750,000 over the next three years.
The staff gathered that day were horrified. “We were expecting some of it,” McAllister said, “but it was absolutely massive!” They were warned that as many as 10 jobs would have to go to help make the necessary savings, and the harsh reality of the difficulties that lay ahead for them personally began to sink in.
“People are frightened,” he said. “They don’t want to lose their jobs. And schools are desperately frightened – if their reputation goes down, parents will choose to go elsewhere.”
As the general election campaign got under way, schools across the country were busy signing off their 2015 budgets, involving some of the most shocking cuts seen in years. The three major parties have given slightly different versions of a commitment to protect education spending, but each pledge has its own caveat that will result in real-term cuts of up to 12%, a fact that none of the parties are talking about ahead of the election.
In schools they are. McAllister’s institution is far from alone. According to the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL), nearly half (49%) of 1,000 headteachers who took part in a recent survey said their school budgets were in either a “critical” or “very serious” state, with almost all of them acknowledging that they are facing financial difficulties.
Although teaching unions have been trying to warn about the coming storm, it has been hard to whip up interest in the rising costs of pension and national insurance contributions that are just part of the problem now facing schools and their vanishing budgets.
At the worst-affected schools, there will be – and have been – redundancies and job losses; elsewhere, GCSE and A-level courses are being scrapped, class sizes are growing, foreign trips are being cancelled and even photocopying is being rationed. Sixth-form teaching time is being pared to the bone, work experience placements stopped, enrichment activities dumped and cheaper, newly qualified teachers (NQTs) hired over more experienced – and therefore more expensive – candidates.
Another teacher at a different secondary school in South Yorkshire reported that colleagues were being asked to teach subjects they are not qualified in, and classroom assistants were being timetabled to teach as a cheap alternative to properly qualified supply teachers.
She said: “I feel really aggrieved at what’s happening. To say there are no budget cuts in operation and children are not suffering is not true. Children’s experiences and education are suffering massively.
“Something very soon has to give. Children’s experiences are less than they can be: the teaching they are receiving is not as good as it should be. They are increasingly being taught by teaching assistants, NQTs and student teachers, and because of the funding crisis, schools are being put in the position of having no choice but to do that.”
She is also a parent and her daughters’ secondary school is facing similar constraints. The headteacher there has sent out a letter to parents trying to explain the reasons behind the budget cuts and the consequences for their children.
Foreign trips are being cancelled – it is expensive for schools to pay for cover for the children that do not go – and pupils who carefully made GCSE choices have been told that their chosen subjects have had to be dropped and that they must choose again.
One inner London primary is laying off six teaching assistants and closing its much loved preschool children’s centre: elsewhere in the capital, which is regarded as well funded by the rest of the country, governors and senior leaders are struggling to balance the books.
One chair of governors at a north London primary school said: “Yes, the budgets are being badly squeezed for complex reasons. Balancing your budget is obviously a prerequisite of getting a good Ofsted, so you can’t tolerate a projected deficit. It’s the 2016-17 budget I am most worried about, although I wouldn’t say this publicly as I don’t want to create unnecessary fear in our fragile community.”
Accountants working with academies warn that some will be particularly badly hit as the education services grant (ESG) – an additional grant received by academies – has been reduced by £53 per pupil from 2015/16, a cut of 38%.
Mike Giddings, the director of education services with chartered accountants Clement Keys, said: “Many schools opted for academy status a few years ago precisely because they wanted more control over their future. Unfortunately, a growing number of individual academies are only now realising that their business model is not sustainable and in some cases, they have only a short period remaining before reserves run out.
“Funding per pupil has been decreasing steadily year on year and individual schools, particularly those with lower pupil numbers, are particularly exposed to this. When you consider that a large secondary academy we are advising received an additional ESG grant of £500,000 four years ago and in 2015-16 will receive just £130,000, it is easy to understand how drastic the situation has become for some schools.”
The crisis is affecting all types of schools – secondaries and primaries, academies, maintained schools, faith schools and grammars. Andy Baker is the headteacher at Poole grammar school in Dorset, which is the second lowest funded area in England for education.
Baker receives £4,300 per student (other schools serving children from deprived backgrounds may get more than £8,000 per pupil) and is having to tackle a cut of £400,000 for this year and next. He has already been forced to drop two A-level courses, politics and media, and may have to cut more.
The toilets are shabby and the sports hall is “decrepit”, but Baker has had to cut back on maintenance spending to stay afloat: in fact, he is trying to raise extra income by cooking lunches for neighbouring primary schools struggling to provide their infants with the Liberal-Conservative coalition’s free school meals.
Baker said: “I have not had to go down the route of redundancy, but every time a member of staff leaves, I have to look very carefully at whether I have to appoint a replacement or whether I can make one member of staff cover two subjects. We are having to look really hard at the subjects we are offering at sixth form; groups in the sixth form are getting bigger and we’ve had reduce the money we allocate to departments for books and materials.
“And I’m worried we are in a period of really enormous change, with the new syllabus [for both GCSEs and A-levels], and we’re going to struggle to resource those courses properly. I think headteachers are looking at the next few years and wondering: ‘How are we going to provide the quality of education that we are at the moment?’”
Brendan Wall, the headteacher of St Simon Stock Catholic school in Maidstone, Kent, has already cut media studies and economics from his timetable; he has lost five members of staff, two of whom were made redundant, three who took voluntary redundancy; class sizes are getting bigger and books, equipment and IT are all affected. He says the sixth form is particularly badly hit, as 16-19 funding has not been protected in the same way as five to 16.
He said: “It’s reducing the life chances of these young people. There is not enough money in the system at sixth-form level to give quality education at academic and vocational levels. We are doing a very good job with limited funding, but if the government continues this lack of funding, it’s bound to reduce the stated aim of providing a world-class educational system.”
Finally, there is Robin Bevan, the headteacher of Southend high school for boys, a selective grammar in the Essex seaside town. He spends about a third of his leadership time managing cuts and balancing the books, which seems too much, but it is the only to way to keep on top – that and the recruitment of “a very competent chartered accountant” as senior finance officer.
He said: “There are schools that realised some time ago – maybe as much as two years ago – that funding constraints were going to cut quite hard. We knew we were heading for real difficulties in 2014-15 and 2015-16 because we did some projections two years ago. But some schools are only just waking up to it.”
After studying those projections, Bevan discovered that his school was facing a shortfall of £250,000. A raft of cost-saving measures was immediately brought in. Contact hours for sixth form students were cut, general studies was axed, and staff who left in the summer were not replaced.
In a one-off attempt to boost the school’s income, Bevan and his team decided to increase the year seven intake last September from 150 to 180 – each boy bringing an extra £4,500 to the school. Going into next year, Bevan thinks he can just about balance the books, but at a price.
He said: “There have always been constraints on the budget. The difference is previously we would be choosing between different kinds of educational programmes – do we run evening classes for foreign languages? Do we put a particular level of investment in art, drama or sport?
“There is at this point, however, something quite different occurring. We are now in a position where none of those things even make it to the table. It’s more like, can we staff the core timetable of the school? We are right on the verge of not being able to do that.
“You can expect some efficiency savings in certain areas, but you can’t keep trimming and trimming and trimming, and expect core provision to remain. It’s pretty challenging. I think there will be schools that will either be running deficits next year or sending pupils home. I can’t see how that won’t happen.”
What the parties are offering on education
Conservative
The Conservative party has promised to protect the schools budget and maintain per-pupil funding at its current level, which, on the positive side, takes into account the growing number of primary age pupils. On the negative, funding will not go up with inflation, which could mean real-terms cuts if inflation rises.
The Tory promise to protect funding does not include education for 16-19-year-olds, which is already causing some schools and sixth forms severe financial difficulties. As with all the main parties, funding promises do not provide additional money to cover the costs of pay rises, and increased pension and national insurance costs that schools are now struggling to meet.
Among other education policies, the Tories are also promising 500 more free schools by 2020 to help ease the crisis in primary places and 30 hours’ free childcare for working parents of three- and four-year-olds.
Labour
Labour has promised, like the Tories, to protect the education budget, but has said that funding will go up in line with inflation. Labour’s pledge on funding also includes the 16-19 sector – unlike the Tories – but on the downside, it does not take into account the population bulge, which will see an extra 300,000 primary pupils by 2018, making greater demands on the existing budget.
Other education promises include a cut in university tuition fees to £6,000 a year, guaranteed access to childcare in primary schools from 8am to 6pm, class sizes capped at 30 for five, six and seven-year-olds and a qualified teacher in every classroom.
Liberal Democrats
The Lib Dems have promised to ringfence the education budget for two- to 19-year-olds in real terms and pledged to raise overall funding from £49bn to £55.3bn over the next parliament. The party says it will spend more on education than either the Conservatives or Labour, and Nick Clegg has made this a “deal-breaker” in any coalition negotiations.
Among other policies, the Lib Dems will extend their universal free school meals offer from years one and two at primary school to include years three to six, and are promising 15 hours’ free childcare a week from the end of paid parental leave.
Green
The Green party is promising a radical rethink of education, with compulsory schooling delayed until age seven and, before that, free universal childcare and early years education costing £8bn a year by the end of the parliament.
Once at school, class sizes will be limited to 20 children per class; the Greens want to abolish SATs and league tables, bring academies and free schools under local authority control, and convert grammars into comprehensives.
The Greens further promise to reinstate the education maintenance allowance (EMA) for 16 and 17-year-olds and scrap university tuition fees.
Ukip
Among Ukip’s notable education policies are its pledges to scrap sex education for primary school children and to have a grammar school in every town.
In higher education, fees for students taking degrees in science, technology, maths or engineering would be abolished on condition that those choosing these subjects pay UK taxes and work in the discipline for five years.
SNP
The SNP is promising to continue free university education in Scotland and support the reduction of tuition fees across the UK. It will extend the availability of EMA in Scotland and fund 30 hours a week of free nursery education for all three- and four-year-olds.
Source:Schools' hidden funding crisis: teachers take drastic action as cuts hit hard