UKH

My local council have recently released their budget proposals for 2020/2021. They are underfunded. They need to save money.

They are going to do that partly by cutting funding to schools by 2%, that equates to a cut of £13,000 on average for each of the primary schools in the authority and a cut of nearly 100k to the secondary school attended by my daughter.

This is politics on the ground, a basic provision that we all should be glad to pay for is being cut in the face of rising costs and greater requirement for provision.

I can write to the financial officer of the council, to my MP, to someone in the Welsh assembly but it won’t do any f*cking good. Provision of education in Monmouthshire is going to get worse. Fast.

Have you just beamed down from your spaceship after being in cryo-sleep for the last ten years?

Archy is right, if this is the first cuts they've had they've got off bloody light!

No, just reiterating what kind of country we live in and how powerless we are to do anything about it. Except vote for liars every few years.

The situation is that there is a budget cut. Writing some letters and raising some stink is probably a good idea but it's not very proactive in solving the problem.

The problem (as I assume you see it) is that the school needs more funds. If there are parents and teachers and children who care enough to act, there are many ways to raise funds for the school - home baking sales, sponsored walk/run/cycle/swim/etc, christmas/easter fayre, raffles, grants for purchase of certain larger items (3d printer/centrifuge/oculus rift/IR spectrometer/etc.) etc etc. Obviously raising £100k is not that realistic, so it's perhaps better to set sights on a lesser figure - the school is basically going to have to tighten its belt no matter what and I'm sure the head will have worked out a financial plan with what funds have been made available.

I'm sure someone will reply to me with "but parents shouldn't have to financially support the state schools" and I'd agree. But this _is_ the world we live in and dreaming it were otherwise accomplishes nothing.

In reply to DaveHK:

2% is misleading. The real cut is probably more like 20+%. This is because almost all the costs of running a school are fixed - you can't suddenly decide to cut teacher salary, just turn the central heating off, not feed the children or leave the roof with a gaping hole because as a school, you don't get to make those decisions. So the entire cut has to come from a very small proportion of the overall budget. Which is why, from time to time, you see newspaper articles about pupils being told the school can't supply them with jotters and they must buy their own - this is something the school has control over and typically I would expect learning materials to be one of the first things to get almost squeezed out of existence.

If you cut a schools budget by 25% across the board, it would close down overnight or drastically overspend because it simply wouldn't be possible to balance its budget without Greek manoeuvrers.

Get Brexit Done!

Aye, that’s the problem when all people care about is paying less taxes. I pay my taxes, not happily, but without grumbling because: 1) I like to feel safe outside 2) I like knowing that if something happens to my health I’ll be helped 3) I like the fact that can expect a base level of education from the state ( people often too high an expectation from this but that is a thread of its own 4) I like to use pools, libraries and public transports 5) l like that the arts and culture are helped along the way and government money helps hugely 6) I like that all of the above is in theory available to all.

It has always escaped me how people can’t see this. I accept that my taxes aren’t always used wisely and I accept that there are some, a minority really, scroungers out there but I would sooner pay a bit more than lose any of the above. Turns out many people do not agree with me.

Very defeatist, you’re playing into the hands of the free marketeers.

A few bake sales is not going to solve the problem. Frankly we have probably reached market saturation on bake sales and all the other fundraising shite we have to do as parents, we’re basically raising extra money from each other to provide a better school.

As Bob Geldof said ‘gimme the f*cking money’. That being some of my money in this case, gladly given.

Then pay your taxes happily, knowing what they provide.

I'm not entirely following your maths. Are you saying it's a 2% cut in total budget but that equates to a 20% cut in non-essential costs like materials (so excluding salaries etc?).

You're right to say they can't cut teacher salaries but they can cut teacher numbers up to a point and get rid of specialist provision. That's what our local authority have been doing. And yes, they have to feed the kids but the quality can drop. Oh and the holes in the roof? We've got them in our school, have done for years and they can't afford to fix them. When the wind blows from the South the water pishes in from above the windows in my classroom. The real concern is that if this causes some of the roof to fall in it will bring part of the asbestos laden wall down but of course the presence of the asbestos makes it too expensive to fix the hole...

So don't be so sure about the 'fixed costs' and what desperate local authorities can and can't save on, it might surprise you!

I've just had a quick look and primary schools in monmouthshire get about £1500 per pupil more than my children's school. So, let me tell you what that means, from a governor's perspective and as a parents.

Classes with no qualified teachers as standard for extended periods, no teaching assistants except those funded specifically for SEND children, book and equipment wish lists sent to parents, no school trips, being asked to purchase your children's work at the end of term at 20p per sheet of paper to cover printing, ancient IT systems, children eating lunch at their desks as there's no room in the hall, classes of more than 30, endless fundraising events, stressed to the eyeballs teachers, no training or development for staff, no pay progression for teachers, buckets in classrooms to catch leaks, vandalism to school property as the fences are broken and can't be fixed, closed playgrounds that need resurfacing, damp temporary  classrooms and a noticeably increased absence rate for those classes, skeleton office staff and a budget deficit. We even turned down a donated, public defibrillator for site because we couldn't afford the costs of fitting it and providing power.

On a wider level, the closure of small village schools who can't cover basic costs, long journeys to now distant schools with no school buses provided. Failure to provide statutory support to children. And forced academisation.

Of course, schools now get more money than ever before.

Enjoy!

I don't enjoy. We shouldn't be competing Yorkshireman style about how shit our underfunded local authorities  are.

Where are you?

You might enquire as to the corresponding pay cuts of the chief executive and other high ups, and put a follow on request in to the council for information on staff payouts following allegations of misconduct etc.  

Perhaps. Are local authorities the new punchbag for our frustration? Underfunded, overstretched, vulnerable to litigation, transparent. Everything that large corporations avoid. I vote for councillors not just to balance the books but to enact local policies to benefit my area. More fool me. This can’t happen as they have been emasculated, suffocated by underfunding. And where has that power gone, where is the other side of that democratic deficit?

We live in a very centralised country. I’m just worried about a specific consequence of that centralisation on me and my children.

There is also masses of inefficiency. Councils like the police and fire are obsessed with revolving around counties and their boundaries, they are often protectionist. There are some which share a few resources or even an over paid CEO, but it's not standard. 

Campaign for council tax rises.

Whatever you try to do, there’ll be some (undoubtedly barely literate) idiots who’ll claim it’s the fault of teachers for being paid too much or some other similar facile nonsense, and some equally complicit Tory turds telling us it’s Labour’s fault and we’ve got to tighten our belts. 

The OP is in Wales, under a Labour government.

I was guessing. I don't have enough information to math it and I'm not going to spend ages trying to find an example school budget online (I did a google but nothing sprang up immediately). I know that teacher salary is a huge percentage of the overall budget that can't be changed by the school or local authority.

I don't know where you work but generally the number of teachers is already at the legal minimum - if a single teacher is off, supply staff have to be brought in because there isn't any slack in any other teachers timetable to cover it. The teaching assistant question is an interesting one - basically it comes down to "do you want to just leave pupils with downs syndrome or severe autism or [other additional learning needs that make their ability to do the same tasks as their peers very challenging] in a class with 30 other pupils and no additional support?" if the answer is "no", you need assistants, if the answer is "yes", I would expect that sooner, rather than later, parents of those pupils would take court action if necessary to ensure their children's rights to an education.

I guess the fixing part is more nuanced. Some things can be ignored but when things get bad enough, you need to fix the problem because at a certain point it gets exponentially worse. There are... engineers? who come round every so often from the council to make those judgements. I guess your council type person is a bit on the conservative side.

I think overall a lot of the things you suggested are already cut to the bone and when you can't cut something any further, you might as well consider it a fixed cost. Personally I'd like to see my school just turn off the central heating unless the forecast is for below freezing conditions and there is a risk of burst pipes but I know that isn't realistic because of the inevitable response from parents

why not income tax rises? - this situation is the continuing austerity policy of underfunding local government by the continuing party in government.  Council tax rises hit poorer people disproportionately

Actually not. I'm in Gloucestershire 1 mile from the Welsh border. Children go to Welsh schools.

And regardless of the political colour of the welsh assembly they get funded by central government.

Yes, this is austerity 'baked in' for many more years whatever the tories say about ending it.

How to react? Vote in a better Government.

Or - take a leaf out of David Cameron's book, and write a stern letter: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/nov/11/cameron-hypocrisy-cuts-let...

Fear not!! We have the opportunity to vote for change on Dec 13th! Oh,Wait......😔

This is not going to be a popular suggestion, so I'm expecting lots of thumbs down, but how about "fewer children".

I am amazed that this is your first experience of a cut. If it is the case then I would possibly suggest that there maybe room to make a 2% cut as other schools have fared alot worse and still survived..

These cuts could be either locally driven or because there is a change in the pupil rate which govts for years have been trying to standardise nationally.Try and understand that.

Write to your MP but also raise money to support your school. Put your hands in your pockets and pay an extra few quid directly to the school. Every little helps, although some people will object to doing it.I took the view that for all the writing and protesting its cash they need to see now.

That doesn't help with the issue of giving the children which already exist a good quality education.

My wife teaches primary part time and does supply.  There has been a MASSIVE drop in supply work coming through.  Just done some maths: lets say average primary school has 230 pupils, and according to bbc schools spend average £168 per pupil on extra staff = £39k on extra staff.  Even assuming some bad maths on my part, by simply getting teaching assistants and headteachers to do what normally supply teachers would do then this saving can be made.

well he might have been making a modest proposal for culling existing children?

Possibly. If so, we might consider the culling of certain troublesome adults as well.

Using teaching assistants isn't legal, they don't have the required teaching qualification. I think if you knew how much work heads and depute heads already have, you wouldn't make the latter suggestion. I don't know a single head or depute head who isn't in at the weekends, taking home work in the evenings, staying at school longer than the rest of the staff weekdays and working during the school holidays just to keep on top of their current workload.

I could get behind that. Could we just rank them all on a scale from most to least annoying and take out the bottom 10%?

I do know how much work they do, and I also observe heads stepping in when staff are off and teaching assistants doing the same, and doing a good job.  Not saying I agree with it, but it does happen and it does work (and has been for a good few years round here when 'the cuts' started to bite.

This depends on the type of school, but some teaching assistants are qualified to cover lessons (HLTAs). Academies can use unqualified staff. The bigger issue for schools will be that many have cut so many TAs that they don't actually have any free to do this, as they are already legally assigned to a pupil with an EHCP.

It isn't but it's the first time the school has reacted by asking parents to take part in the council funding consultation. The school regards any further cuts as an existential threat. 

And another and another? Flawed logic.

They are driven mainly by the increased costs due to teachers (well deserved) pay award and pension contribution change, these have not been adequately funded centrally, so must come out of 'savings'.

I have been doing my bit to raise money for schools for 9 years, though I don't think this sort of fundraising should be used for core provision by a school, it sets a very nasty precedent. Is this really all you can come up with?

Because they haven't got anything else to do?

There is a difference between

1) The occasional cover being done by a head/depute when it is a) at their discretion and b) only done when there is unusually short notice/no supply staff available

and 

2) Heads/deputes should cover classes when staff are off as a matter of policy.

I can get behind the former under circumstances where it doesn't become ever more common and morph into the latter which I think is unreasonable.

In reply to Wil Treasure:

My knowledge is based on Scotland and with public schools, I realise it's a bit different south of the border, so probably should have qualified my statements somewhat.

When it comes to private schools, it's a different debate because the parents are paying the whole cost and all of the rules about class sizes and who can do what do not apply. Personally, I think that while there may well be great people out there who can teach a class without being qualified, they are the exception rather than the rule and that it is a mistake to start down the path of saying that your teachers don't necessarily need a teaching qualification.

I thought that might be the case as I posted.

Just to avoid confusion, academies are not private schools. They are state schools that report to central government rather than the local authority and have more autonomy over things like staffing and pay (to oversimplify). Absolutely agree that teachers need to be qualified (I am one), really the only good unqualified teachers will be working towards becoming qualified or teaching a niche A-Level subject in a private school.

The way you wrote your OP suggested that it is your first expereince of such cuts and that was my response. Clearly it is not so I would not have replied with my thoughts had you been clearer in your OP.

Right. I knew there was something funny with academies. I had in my head that it was maybe outsourced education run by private companies (essentially privatised education) but I wasn't feeling sufficiently motivated to go learn about it before making a post

Sorry, I assumed that you were in Wales.

 I'd agree part of it depends on what the central government allocates the assembly in terms of total budget, but choices on budget allocation to health, education, transport etc are all devolved to the assembly, so it is their decision.

I was a secondary school teacher for a short period a couple of years ago. I realised just how under funded it was straight away. It was shocking. In one of my classes I had 37 kids. I only had 32 chairs and desks to accommodate a maximum of 32 kids. In most of the classes there were 33 - 35 kids.

No class room support staff.

No pens, glue and barely any photocopying budget for the department. It was worse than most people could imagine. This was a decent school in Manchester. At the time it was Ofsted outstanding. It has unsurprisingly recently been graded RI by Ofsted.

Provision of education in Monmouthshire is probably much the same as everywhere else.....inadequate.

That wasn't my intention, education should be over funded everywhere. Every penny you spend on education will be repaid by those children in adulthood and more. Every penny you pinch from children will turn into pounds of multi agency support to deal with the effects of mental health, poverty, crime and inequality.

I'm in Sussex.

Suck it up. A bit like the Remainers lost Brexit, the taxy taxy spendy spendy parties lost last year’s election.

It may sound defeatist what is there to be done other than hunker down and await the next election?

Loads can be done. Get involved in the PTA, get fundraising or just support the stuff that's already going on. Last year they raised £7000 at the primary my youngest attends and my eldest used to. Not bad on the surface, but it's always the same 70 or 80 parents that attend fundraising events, so less than a fifth. If even half the parents made an effort austerity wouldn't have impacted the school at all.

So yeah, the government is crap and austerity is shit but the reality is this stuff doesn't happen in isolation. Either through votes or inaction society gets what it deserves.

Can i ask, as i am not well educated in matters of state finance, what are the reasons for the cuts?

I know 'austerity' is probably the answer but why the austerity measures in the first place? The government aren't doing it for the craic presumably.

Which raises the question of - where is the 2% going that's being taken from the schools?

NHS, Welfare, Roads what?

Genuine question. 

Because the money is spent by councils (in the main) - if they were allowed to raise the bulk of the money they required themselves then they could be more flexible.

IIRC the bulk of taxation in the UK used to be raised and spent locally - splitting the spenders from the collectors clearly creates issues around accountability.

After a long and ignominious career defeating everyone else we've finally decided to defeat ourselves.

Local authorities can't control what their income is, central gov finance has reduced in real terms, their power to increase council tax is capped and anyway they'd be voted out of they increased it as much as they needed to.

At the same time their statutory commitments remain and new costs are imposed such as teacher salary increases.

That's why libraries and youth services are disappearing, its part of a policy to disempower local government.

Thanks for the explanation.

(Again) merely curious and i haven't read the entire thread but as you are the OP what do you propose they do about it?

Clearly the money has to come from somewhere, but where?

That sounds something Field Martial Erwin Rommel might have said...  

Well inflation is running a little over 2% so it's probably evaporating and not really going anywhere.

The reason for austerity - The sub Prime collapse and subsequent bailing out of the banks and the increase in debt as a % of GDP is being used to justify extreme austerity, whilst at the same time reducing taxes on companies and the rich (supposedly to promote growth and investment)

There's various levels of 'they'; starting at individual schools, next is the council budget committee, council leadership, Welsh government budget committees, Welsh assembly, Westminster. All forming an upsidedown food chain.

There is plenty of money.

Quite, except all that potential growth and investment is instead salted away by a very few.

Certainly in secondary schools, the enormous change has been the Cover Supervisor.  They were first introduced in the 2003 Workload Agreement as a way to prevent teachers from having to do too much cover work in their free periods.  They're unqualified staff, paid about 1/3 of a teachers salary, and I'm afraid to say that they are generally about as effective as you'd expect an unqualified teacher with a few day's trainng to be.

Originally the idea was that they'd be employed directly by schools, and for the first few years that's what happened - a school would have a CS or two on their books and would use them rather than teaching staff for cover.  At least they got to know the school and its way of working, and the pupils got to know them.  But then supply agencies realised they could employ them, and use them to provide cover at a hugely reduced price. 

So the bottom has dropped out of the qualified supply market.  I left the classroom full-time in 2012, intending to work partly as a tutor and partly as a supply teacher, but in the years since then I've done about five days supply in state secondaries.  The CS are so much cheaper, no-one would dream of using a properly qualified supply teacher.

well perhaps that makes the case for local income tax as a fairer solution

This is definitely a big change. I've worked with several who were excellent and having an in-house way to cover lessons, with someone the kids know and who I can speak to directly about the lessons they'll cover (and get feedback) is actually very useful. It takes a good personality to be able to do the job effectively I think.

I've not experienced this through an agency. I've done a reasonable amount of supply and schools have generally been very grateful to have a qualified teacher, even if I'm not teaching my specialist subject. I've never come across a supply teacher in any school I've been in who wasn't qualified, I have come across several who were qualified but completely useless!

Which, right there, is a way in which the Scottish system is demonstrably better. There are no supply agencies, teaching isn't outsourced to private enterprise without limits on standards. So every single teacher teaching every single class must be fully qualified.

Regulation! Who would have thought it could be a good thing.

I disagree, it's the responsibility of Central government to enact it's policies via general taxation. Don't forget that provision of education is a universal human right. the means to provide it seems best served by a commonly owned public service which should be funded generously as we regard it as important. Once created it should be maintained and modernised as needed not constantly attacked and undermined by commercially driven interests. Academies, faith schools and all these other dishonestly presented attempts to introduce a market to the education of young humans are a bunch of bullshit.

Yep, or that - but critically more income for what you want locally, raised locally.

But why not devolve education funding to councils?

if the voters of Shropshire want to spend more on education, let them.

Oh, I heard that all republicans think that [snicker]

You might want to switch agency.  I haven't stopped since I went on supply a couple of years ago.  Cover supervisors shouldn't be used for long term absences.  

I think the problem with both your suggestions there is that not all areas of the country are equally prosperous and when you transfer an ever-increasing financial burden onto local fundraising, rich areas can afford to raise more funds and better fund education, areas that are struggling can raise less money and fall increasingly behind the richer areas. This lower standard of education leads to more adults out of work, less jobs, more poverty, successful people move to areas of the country that are richer and the whole process continues in a vicious cycle, contributing to the growth between "have's" and "have not's" (to use a grossly simplified and at least moderately offensive turn of phrase).

The answer to this problem is to raise taxes centrally and apportion them "equally" (exactly how you work that out is very much up for debate) across the country so that there is less fuelling of the disparity between rich (i.e. SE England) and poor (i.e. everywhere else) areas.

It's essentially the same argument as that for inheritance tax only on an area basis rather than an individual basis: If you have money, generally you can make more and the more you have, the more you can make, the theoretical conclusion being 1 person with all the money and everyone else with none, however there will be a crisis miles before anything like this can happen. If you want to stop this reaching crisis point, you use a central government (or other force) to redistribute the wealth. Your balance can be heavily redistributive (Japan, Scandanavia, etc.) or heavily non-redistributive (lots of Africa and South and Central America) but the closer you get to the latter, the closer you get to major social upheaval which is likely to be terrible for everyone, rich and poor alike.

So have central funds to make up the difference - if we want more devolution, then we will get differing outcomes in different regions.

Don't expect anything to change. Unite are pushing for Wrong-Daily to be leader, which will leave the tories unchallenged and give them a second term. (In the absence of the lib dems coming out of their coma).

You have my sympathy - sadly not of much practical use. When I took up a secondary headship I inherited a deficit of over £200,000 (and that was 20 years ago). Getting it down was hard work: it took a number of years and inevitably involved staff carrying pretty heavy teaching loads. As you yourself have said, the current cuts are the result of ideological austerity, ie a refusal to raise the tax necessary to fund state provision adequately. They are exacerbated by academisation, a ridiculously expensive initiative based on ideology rather than evidence. We now have hundreds of CEOs of tiny academy chains, earning as much if not more for "leading" a handful of schools, as old style LEA Directors of Education got for leading a hundred or so. 

We’ll see.

I am pretty pissed off about this. I have never voted for the Conservative party, especially not last December. When I see the Facebook threads about this, I know some of the angry posters voted that way. They can just f*ck off, cuts to public services are what they voted for. 

Thanks.

The deficit issue scares me, the school I’m concerned about has a deficit a bit less than half that but it’s a rural primary school with only 100 children on the roll. I’ve probably given too much information away as it is and I don’t want give away any more about individual institutions.

I don’t know what the rules are with budget deficits - do individual schools always have to work them out of their systems themselves or are they ever distributed or written off/down?

if the answer is no then a year of staff Illness could result in closure!!

I fear your school will have to deal with the deficit unaided. Even back in my LEA days, I can only recall deficits getting written off through some kind of restructuring - eg merger, closure & reopening. I guess it might still happen if a failing school gets "rebrokered" into a new academy chain. None of that's any help unfortunately. The best thing that happened to funding during my time was Tony Blair!

Done well, it can make a lot of sense.  I've seen it done pretty terribly, though - people taken on in September, given literally a few days 'training', and dropped into classes. 

Absolutely.  Even in your own specialism, to walk into a classroom, pick up the hastily-written cover lesson, and be able to manage a class who are already thinking 'brilliant - it's a cover teacher so we can play up' is one hell of a thing to be able to do.  Outside of your own specialism it's even harder.

In reply to marsbar:

Thanks - I wasn't actually bothering with an agency (I was well known enough in the local area that several schools knew me as an independent supply teacher they could call upon - this was a common thing as it saved paying an agency cut).  Problem was they all stopped using any external supply at all because they had far cheaper CS.

I'm not too worried - my tuition work has absolutely taken off and I've got more work than I want, which is a nice place for a freelancer to be in.

You could ask them what happened to "austerity is over".

Lies and more lies and bullshit, yet they're in power and no one gives a f*ck.

That's a fairly understandable response.  But if you dig deeper into how pensions are funded, and mortality/life expectancy rates and the assumptions pension actuaries use, (completely separate from the environmental costs of having more children), the point wbo2 makes is quite a complex discussion and there may be a link, but there are many other factors in play which may be more significant.

My words, Erick and and my husband's, too! 

What's the funding per pupil? I've no idea what the averages are but it was a key pledge in the conservative manifesto:

Though if Brexit didn't go ahead you could easily triple that budget in exchange for the divorce bill...