Funding may not be the issue in schools?

People have gone from expecting an essential service to education to requiring it to cover parenting, pastoral care, and more. While I see value in some of this, where does parenting stop and school start?

I can’t see any government reversing this though. Nobody in power is going to tell parents not to send their child to reception if they aren’t potty trained or they can’t use a knife/fork.

Yep and they tend to exacerbate each other.

I think that the expectations placed on schools has changed too. They are expected to be social services, CAMHS, medical and parental as well as education.

For example when there’s a case of child neglect, kids having possible special needs or a report that says kids leave school without a life skill (say having more credit card debt than their annual salary) then some people assume that school bears some fault for not flagging and rectifying things. The National Curriculum is designed by politicians and teacher training doesn’t include material taught to police, social workers, mental health specialists, educational psychologists… who are also responsible for child welfare. Cutting those services inevitably affects schools as well as children.

There are still plenty of areas where more funding would help, and even if you re-directed some funding from areas you happen to consider 'unnecessary' ,there still wouldn't be enough.

Schools near me have no textbooks, have to photocopy endless worksheets at half size to save paper and ink, ask for donations of soap for the toilets, can't afford to rebuild or fix any of the issues with the buildings or toilets, get the children to bring in their own whiteboard pens and erasers as they can't afford it, and thousands of other issues, as many people have pointed out. Funding would make a huge difference to that.

Funding teachers properly to get enough of them to stay to reduce the workload to manageable levels would also make a huge difference, and to be able to afford the staff needed to properly address SEN to allow those children to be supported fully as well.

I think that properly funding special schools and PRUs will solve a lot of issues in comprehensives and primaries.

If the children who can’t cope with mainstream are educated in more appropriate settings then this would not only benefit the child in question but also the classmates whose education is disrupted.

It shouldn’t be the norm for staff or kids to be physically attacked or to have to be in the same class as a pupil who has attacked them on multiple occasions. It’s not fair on anyone.

Schools have their hands tied when it comes to suspensions and expulsions and the inability to use these sanctions because OFSTED etc makes consequences for things like forgetting to bring a green pen to class, completely pointless and petty.

I completely understand why staff would rather work retail which isn’t an easy job when behaviour is at an all time low because of bureaucracy.

funding is not the only issue, but it is the main one. My child goes to a wealthy state school in the United States.

We have a team of counseling staff with one person assigned to about each 150 students. These people follow your child for their entire time at the school and take care of pastoral needs. If there is a problem with my child that is not directly classroom related, I contact the counselor, not the teacher. The counselor who is not busy all day with a classroom full of children.

we have a full-time nurse that covers all medical issues.

Based upon the number of 1:1 aids we see in the classrooms, they are not an incredibly scarce resource.

Talking to other special needs parents, none have ever mentioned the school trying to make the child’s day shorter or to exclude the child from an outing. The school makes sure there is adequate staff.

all of this takes money.

It's not either or. It's a budget problem and lots of other problems.* *

Agree. 2 of my teacher friends have now left and the remaining one is hanging on by a thread. All primary school teachers, dealing with low-level disruption from maybe half the class, verbal abuse from a third, violence from 1 or 2 kids, and then the minority that want to learn but aren't because of the others. And this is every day. It's not a minority of pupils, it's the majority of them.

I don't know how we've gotten here. I know that I work with naice MC people who all seem to think parenting has nothing whatsoever to do with them - it appals me the things I hear them chatting about.

Funding is an issue because children need SEN support, pastoral support, some physical support, interventions and behaviour management. There is also four times the amount of parental engagement than 20 years ago. I think both can be true. I have done more parenting in schools than I ever thought I needed to.

I work in an inner city school and it isn’t just an SEN issue. There is also a huge fine motor skill issue, socialising issue and resilience issue in schools.

Mat costings tends to be cheaper because of the economy of scales.
Maintained Schools will be paying for the same provision and some LA provision usually at a higher rate.
Some Mats charge more for schools needing more support and less for better schools that support others. They all vary.

For our schools, the issue is the growing needs of children and parents that place additional strain on the workload. CIN, CP, CME, FGM, judicial reviews. MH support, paying bills advice, growing amount of appeals and exclusion costs, rising costs of meals and chasing up money for meals, trips, damage, children not collected, home visits, missed meetings, assaults, safeguarding outside of school time, DV, home food packages, SS meetings, data requests, staff absence through assault and illness and OT costs, and the complexities of school life has grown and are completely different to ten years ago. These needs are real and can not morally be ignored and the majority of parents work with school well in my experience. But having one or two unreasonable parents makes work difficult. and unpleasant. Education is not the same as it was even three years ago, it is changing at a fast pace.
If you want to keep excellent experienced staff it will cost you more.

@SallyLovesCheese the direction of travel (certainly under Conservative Government) is to increase the size of MATs so pretty much half the number of current CEOs, with mergers etc. Will be interesting o see if Labour carry on this trend. Ultimately we may end up with similar to LEAs but more likely to be spread across a larger geographical area

But a main driver of Sure Start was to mix social classes- so they were intended in the day care to have middle class children as well on the grounds that they raised expectations and provided role models. It was part of the social mobility strategy.

I'm not convinced that the numbers of MAT SLT and the salaries they are on across all MATs in an old LEA equal the previous numbers of LEA senior staff and their salaries.

@SallyLovesCheese the theory with MATs is that the money that goes towards the central team including CEO salary matches the amount that was siphoned off by LEA with top slice and service level agreements that state maintained schools have to pay.

Some MATs are huge with large number of employees, pupils, estates. You wouldn't get CEOs with similar level of responsibilities in other organisations getting paid less than CEOs of MATs.

I think part of the issue is the creation of MATs and how money is used within them. You can have a CEO on £200k, plus non-teaching SLT on all larger salaries, which leaves less money for teaching staff (I include TAs in that) and additional things that children need. That's why schools now prefer to get in NQTs (ECTs) and school-based trainees and get rid of their more expensive, experienced teachers. That means all that experience of behaviour management and dealing with complex issues etc. is gone.

Plus, yes, all the access to Sure Start gone and no investment in Early Years. This will massively impact families and then change in parent and children behaviour and mindset doesn't change.

It's a massive, massive issue and is going to take years to sort out. Meanwhile, all the Tory buddies are swanning off with their millions of tax payers' money for doing squat.

I think you may be referring to later phases.

It's interesting that the most successful community support schemes are almost always community led. But politicians hate the lack of control/accountability, so inevitably change schemes to be centrally controlled and impose greater restrictions on how funds are allowed to be spent, and the benefits achieved start to decline as a consequence.

ifs.org.uk/articles/sure-start-achieved-its-aims-then-we-threw-it-away

I disagree with you. I don’t think it’s an ‘expectation’ problem but a funding issue. And not just a funding in education problem but a cut in every single public service over the last several years. It’s an ongoing austerity problem.
For families everything is worse now than ever. I read yesterday that 1 in 3 children in the UK are now living in relative poverty!!

Life for many families is desperate.
Cost of living/housing is ridiculous.
A global pandemic.
Cuts to education and NHS funding getting worse year on year.
Services like Surestart cut.
Climate crisis looming.

I detest the notion that all problems in society/schools are a parenting issue. It lets us off the hook at looking at what the real issues are. Yes behaviour is a problem, yes too many SEN kids are not suited to mainstream, but until we address the root causes of these issues and until services are properly funded then yes schools unfortunately will have to pick up some pieces.

Can only agree.

I have seen a change in the last 2 weeks here - our local primary went from Requires Improvement to Good and is now doubling its TA workforce from 1 per class to 2 per class. All full time and paid by the Academy.

People are falling over themselves to apply for the TA roles as NMW is expected to go up with Labour (some say £12 PH and some say £15 PH).

People are leaving their office jobs to be term time only. I’m tempted myself having been a TA before. Current NMW is quite good and it means I don’t lose much in pay!

But yes, racism and aggression in Year 5 and 6 is bad here as well.

@Sharptonguedwoman children go to school quite early in this country, but in many countries where formal education starts later most children will go to some form of nursery for a few years before school.

I think Switzerland encourage walking to school independently as early as 4yo, and yet we can’t teach our children to use cutlery at that age

We don't need to hand parenting over to teachers.

I agree.
Many parents expect schools and teachers to do much more than teach and support - they expect them to parent for them.
Expecting SEN support in schools is perfectly reasonable, that's not what I am referring to with my comment above.