Govt announces huge cut to schools funding, redundancies

[noblegiraffe]

Yesterday the government announced that there would be huge cuts to schools funding and this would mean larger class sizes, less support for SEND pupils and a smaller subject offering.

You might have missed this as it was framed as a generous pay rise for teachers.

This pay rise will be massively below inflation and therefore represent a large pay cut for experienced teachers, where ‘experienced’ means that they have been teaching for 5 years. The pay rise for new teachers is well below (due to inflation) what was promised in the 2019 Conservative manifesto as necessary to tackle the teacher recruitment crisis. schoolsweek.co.uk/dfe-announces-5-pay-rise-for-most-teachers-in-2022-23/

However, poor as the pay offering is, the critical issue is that the government isn’t going to fund it. Schools would need to fund these pay rises from their existing budgets, which will mean that either teachers don’t get the pay rise (this happens) or there will be cuts and redundancies in schools, or both.

School funding itself will only rise by 1.9% which, as everyone is acutely aware, will not be enough to deal with the across-the-board price rises. schoolsweek.co.uk/school-per-pupil-funding-to-rise-by-only-1-9-per-cent-next-year/

Schools have already made redundancies, cuts to SEN provision and subject provision over the last 12 years of dire education funding. We are now cutting deep into the bone of educational provision.

So when the government talk about accepting in full the pay recommendation from the pay review body whose hands the Treasury tied, or about selfish unions and greedy teachers, in the end it’s going to be the kids who are losing out, when their class sizes increase, their SEN provision is reduced, they can’t take the subjects that they want, and their school can’t provide them with a qualified teacher.

That is true basil, teachers when polled say that they would rather have a 10% increase in non-contact time than a 10% increase in pay.

But an inability to recruit and retain decent teachers increases workload, so if pay is a factor in that, then it's all linked.

It’s utterly depressing. I’m an SEN a specialist, at mainstream secondary, my school is great, but the provision we put is expensive and we have to make hard choices. We are a school of 1500, we get 4 days EP support a year, in half a day she can discuss 3 kids or assess one. We have 35 with EHCPs and more in draft stage. This year the LA took away an EP day because the service didn’t have capacity.

We have 2 trained ELSA they have over 100 on wait list and are at absolute max capacity.

No one gets to see a speech and language specialist unless they have an EHCP with that as primary need. If we want language assessment we have to commission and it costs hundreds of pounds so we don’t.

We are constantly short of TAs because we can’t pay enough to recruit and retain.

All local special schools are full. We have a couple of children whose needs we can’t meet but LA has no alternatives, so we do our absolute best, but it’s heartbreaking. Kids have become violent due to being unable to cope in a huge secondary school, when everyone knew they weren’t coping for months but couldn’t do anything.

And that’s now. Access to specialist support is getting harder and harder.

Many schools make the decision to discourage families with children with complex needs because funding adequate support is increasing difficult. I think it’s immoral, because it makes it even harder for schools like mine, but the real problem is government funding.

As inflation increases poverty we’ll have more families in stress and more mental health needs.

I am Now officially an Ex teacher . 10 years .

I earned £40k a year and worked 70 hours a week. Yes , I got holidays !!! I would generally work 25 hours a week in these apart from the summer where i wouldn’t work for 2
Weeks . I have worked out I will earn much more in Tesco by working 45 hours a week in my new role .

No kids spitting at me or being racially attacked . No more parents threatening me. No constant observations . No constant looking after 32 children a day without a TA and the correct funding .

Schools are falling apart . The behavior is awful but not tackled.
I worked in a deprived area and the parents used to threaten staff regularly . Slash tires .

All you hear is that teaching staff

• get load of holidays


• teachers are lazy


• teaxhers work 9-3 ! Try 7-10pm!

if never evr go back .

@RockandRollsuicide
It is SENDCO

On my PGCE SEN was a huge focus. You go on 3 placements to different schools and each school will have SEN!
Each lesson a teacher plans for all abilities and specifically for SEND children in line with their ECHP.
There a modules on SEN but this is a common theme which runs through out the whole PGCE.

Roughly
30% of my previous class last year where SEN and my student on her PGCE has to plan specifically for each child . I would then coach her on what
worked well and what didn’t . She would use her uni knowledge , the child’s ECHP and my help
to provide sufficient lessons and support . There isn’t just a one day module!

To be. SENDCo you have to take a
university approved 2 year course ! I am not saying that teacher are amazing and provide great planning /
support and are all amazing at SEN but there is huge focus on SEN.

@RockandRollsuicide
SEN provision is poor because there is a lack of funding to provide the correct resources .
E.g
Lack of staff to provide 1/1 Or small group classes
Lack of resources which we urgently need

In my school ( before I resigned from
teaching this year)
They stripped the class TA away . This TA would be able to take small groups out .
So now, they use the 1:1 TA to be the class
TA .

@RockandRollsuicide That is if they even give the child the 1:1 they should have. As we see so many children without as the child isn’t automatically awarded a 1:1. They are awarded
funding!! This is the schools way of not always allocating a 1:1.

i won’t go on anymore !!! I would be here for days.

I trained as a secondary school teacher in 1999 at a Russell Group university (PGCE). We got half a day on SENs. At school we had one inset (after school session) on autism which, now that I have a son with autism, I realise was rubbish. I’m not a teacher any more but I have my own tutoring business. I am very good with SENs as my son has so many of them! I realise now how much I failed the kids with SENs in my lessons when I was a teacher through pure ignorance. I feel really guilty about that.

I found this article from April about the impact of the energy price hikes then:

"The top three actions that headteachers said they would take as a result of the rising costs were reducing energy consumption (64 per cent), reducing investment in equipment for the school (54 per cent), and reducing maintenance and/or capital spending (53 per cent).

Other responses included reducing investment in professional development (46 per cent), reducing the number of teaching assistants (40 per cent) and reducing the number of teachers (15 per cent)."

So the budgets for September were already set with cuts embedded. This new news that the pay rise will be unfunded will smash those already crippling budgets.

40% of headteachers were already reducing the number of teaching assistants and 15% the number of teachers. And now they need to get rid of more.

Very worrying times for schools.

www.tes.com/magazine/news/general/schools-forced-cut-teacher-numbers-owing-energy-price-rises

My FS attended a special secondary school and I was hopping mad when his Headteacher refused to use government catch up money to fund children catching up. Government should have ring fenced it. She said it could be used to fund another ta but there are only 12 in each class and lower sets already have a ta in each class. Now I suppose the extra ta money will go to fund Teachers pay rise. I wonder if she anticipated the underfunding of Teachers pay rise.

I was hopping mad when his Headteacher refused to use government catch up money to fund children catching up. Government should have ring fenced it.

It was? Schools had to be able to show that it was used on activities to help catch up missed learning. www.gov.uk/government/publications/catch-up-premium-coronavirus-covid-19/catch-up-premium#accountability-school-leaders-and-governors

What did the school use it for?

Government should have ring fenced it

They did. What did the school spend it on?

There obviously wasn’t enough money to allow weeks of 1:1 tuition for every child though.

In the end the lower sets had an additional ta and some counseling for kids struggling with pandemic but no kids got offered catch up of lessons or allowed the National Tutoring Program other school kids got and these top set kids still had to do their GCSE exams. Not all money was spent. There was a newsletter saying some was being held back until it was decided what to spend it on. Now I suppose it will be swallowed up in topping up not funded pay rises.

Just read caveat in the gov document. Can carry funding forward to future school years.

Class sizes also rising in SEN schools. My classes used to be capped at 7 students with 3 support staff. In Sept my class rises to 12, with 2 support staff. 3 students have ENF and should have 1:1s. I no longer teach, it’s all about pastoral and behaviour management. It all sucks 🙁

My niece at her school got an online tutor 1/2 hour before school each day in week for 1 term catch up of English, second term Maths and third term Science. Pupils in small groups of 4 or 5 at same ability. Not all kids chose to participate but all year 7 - 11 got option to participate. I think initially they were told 1 subject, but because many did not want it the ones who did got a second then third term. My sister said it made a big difference to my niece.

Our primary school yearly running costs are going up the equivalent of 1.5 TAs full time wages. We have been on a zero TA recruitment for years (after a round of redundancies a few years ago), not replacing anyone who leaves. Outside of Foundation Stage, nearly all our TAs support SEN children.
Added to this we are increasingly expected to provide/ fund counselling services for children. In the past we would refer children to GP/CAMHS if they were struggling with their mental health. Now GPS and Social Services are telling parents to get support from schools.
I'm pretty sure the government will blame the teachers inflationary pay demands for the squeeze on budgets when it is yet another significant real term pay cut.

Can’t say I’m surprised

but no kids got offered catch up of lessons or allowed the National Tutoring Program

The problem with the National Tutoring program was that schools had to pay 25% of the costs (think that has gone up to 50%?) out of their own funds, it wasn’t free to schools.

If your school got an additional TA and counselling, it’s likely your niece’s school didn’t, and paid for the tutoring instead.

no kids got offered catch up of lessons or allowed the National Tutoring Program

I don’t know any schools locally that used the National Tutoring program-we would have had to part fund it and we didn’t have the money to do so.

It wasn’t a scheme to get quality experienced teaching into schools, it was to get cheap tutors and to make money for government approved agencies. Our school used the money to pay existing part time teachers who already knew the children and persuaded them to work more hours.

I asked my school about getting NTP/catch-up tutoring for some of my struggling Y11s and they said that there weren’t any maths tutors to do it.

The FE sector has suffered these sort of cuts for several years and nobody did anything. I did wonder when it would start to filter down to schools.

My DH left FE when his salary was cut by 30% and all SEN staff were sacked without notice due to massive budget cuts. DH was told he would have to offer the SEN support that was previously someone’s full time job, on top of doing his own full time job as a teacher. He isn’t qualified in SEN provision and didn’t feel comfortable being responsible for it, nor did he feel he could teach properly at the same time.

He’d already been asked to do extra work without pay (because they couldn’t afford to pay him), and had been told to minimise the use of paper and pens and other resources because they couldn’t afford them (so he couldn’t do activities to make his lessons engaging). He was teaching out of date materials because the college couldn’t afford new textbooks and updated software to teach the up to date stuff. And he had been told to provide his prepared materials to an unqualified teacher who would deliver them to another class and get paid half his salary.

So this is what you can expect going forward for schools. Just look at FE and you can see where this is going to go.

We were a lucky school that got an NTP tutor in maths.
However the sessions still need organising and coordinating by a teacher, putting more work on to schools.

I'm hoping we all strike in the Autumn. The state of education is letting too many students down due to lack of funding.

Emarjha

This is not the first time schools have had to go through this.

Teachers like noble have been highlighting this for many years, yet nothing has been done to support or stop the rot.

we had the worthless campaign which just redistributed the money in the pot and the last pay rises came from inside the budget with no supporting increase.

We had support staff delivering the tutoring. Frankly, a lot of what I saw of it was terrible.