Teachers balloting for strike action - school closures

[noblegiraffe]

A pre-ballot poll from the NEU suggests that the ballot will be in favour.

The NASUWT have announced that their ballot will open around 27th October in England, Scotland and Wales, and will close on 9th January, I assume that the NEU will be doing similar and it would be joint action.

Strike action would mean school closures around Jan/Feb time and obviously this will impact parents who need to start thinking about arrangements for this eventuality. Please consider emailing your MP asking them to forward any concerns about this to Kit Malthouse, Secretary of State for Education, as any pressure on him from parents to avert strike action by entering pay negotiations would be highly welcome.

The current pay offer of 5% for most teachers is unfunded, meaning that it has to come out of current school budgets. This means that the pay rise will result in cuts to education provision for your children. However, this offer is after over a decade of real terms pay cuts for teachers and with inflation at 10%, teachers cannot afford more pay cuts and to continue to shoulder the burden of government financial incompetence and deliberate running into the ground of public services any longer.

The unions are asking for an above inflation fully funded pay rise for teachers. A teacher pay rise, any teacher pay rise, cannot come out of current school budgets as this will mean a lower quality of education for your children. This could involve even bigger class sizes, even fewer courses on offer, even less provision for SEN children, fewer school trips and extra curricular activities.

School funding has been devastated by the Tory government over the last 12 years. SEN funding has been cut: the impact falls on schools and teachers to deal with. CAMHS funding has been cut: the impact falls on schools and teachers to deal with. Schools are being asked to solve more and more of society's issues, with fewer and fewer resources. It's unsustainable.

People will tell you that teachers are well paid and don't deserve a pay rise. However, we have a critical shortage of teachers, and the obvious conclusion is that if we can't get teachers for the pay that is on offer, then the pay is not enough. Market forces, right?

The government know the impact of increasing pay to attract and keep teachers; they have, this week, announced a big increase to the teacher training bursaries in response to the truly dire and alarming numbers of applicants to teacher training this year. They have also introduced early career payments in shortage areas. They have yet to extend this logic to increasing teacher pay to retain more experienced teachers - the ones who are crucial in training and supporting the new and early career teachers.

I'm not suggesting in the slightest that teachers are more deserving than other workers, or that we have it harder than other workers. If you have also not had a pay rise in years, that's unacceptable. If you are balloting for strike action, or undertaking strike action to try to improve your working conditions, then all power and support to you. I really hope that school support staff join us in taking action.

This government is ruining the country. I think everyone can see that now. Instead of proposing increases to public funding, they are proposing further cuts. But we've already cut everything.

They'll claim there is no money, but then propose tax cuts for the best off. They'll reject windfall taxes even when Shell is asking for them. They'll claim that higher wages will increase inflation so they can't possibly increase wages, while talking about how important it is to move to a higher wage economy. Not higher wages for the ordinary worker though, they mean the ones already on high wages. The ones who would have benefited from the 45p tax rate cut that they've already had to u-turn on.

The DfE have said that strike will damage the education of children, that they can't afford to miss out on more school. Teachers, if they vote to strike, will be voting for better education. We want a qualified, decent teacher in front of every class. This is absolutely not happening at the moment, and will not have a chance of happening unless teacher pay and conditions improve.

TLDR: Support teachers; the government are self-interested, public service destroying, incompetent shitheads.

Of course, but schools are allocated an amount of money for this within their delegated budget.

I do appreciate that the £6000 is then deducted from the £18,500.

But the notional £ 6000 is just that, notional! If a child with additional needs joins a school, they don't bring an extra £6000 with them, the school is " assumed" to have it.

But they are allocated an amount of money for it within their funding.

Of course, it is going to be harder to manage if 35% of pupils have SEN, but that can’t be normal, surely?

I think that is something that a lot of people don’t understand because the £6000 figure is thrown around by local authorities so much people just assume that is allocated for the child.

I work in education

So not in schools then? Your username suggests a nursery?

16.6% of all pupils nationally were on SEN support 2021/22 (Gov.uk)

With natural fluctuation across types of schools and catchments, a school having double this is not unusual.

Whether you call it 'delegated budget' or not, the fact remains that if a child has SEN, the school must spend almost all the money it receives for that pupil on meeting their needs before they receive a single penny extra.

So in my county, looking at the secondary schools, I can compare a school with 30% SEN vs one with 1.4%. If both had 1000 pupils, the school with 30% SEN has £1.72 million less to spend on teachers, buildings, heating, lighting, resources etc etc than the one with 1.4% if they spend the £6,000 on each child's needs. That simply isn't compatible with keeping the lights on.

Yes, I own a nursery, so we receive the EHCP funding without the £6000 deduction. Therapy is provided for on top of the funding for 1:1 support, and the parents are also able to claim direct payments.

It’s a substantial amount of money to be fair.

What percentage of your children are on the SEN register, and how much money do you charge / receive per child?

How many of your staff are qualified teachers (ie what is your average salary for each member of staff)?

You have to realise how different the two funding models are.

But if 30% of pupils have SEN, you surely have to find a more economical way of managing the budget than providing them all with individual TAs. In that scenario, wouldn’t it be cheaper to have a separate class with a dedicated SEN teacher and one TA to support?

The funding models are very different, but we also receive substantially less money per funded child.

But that would only come close to working if all those pupils had similar extra needs and needed similar support.

an approach like that is very close to just pushing children out to make things “easier” and not about what is best for the individual

It’s more or less £1200 per child per term for 15 hours; double that for 30. We are obviously not paying out 40 grand plus for teachers (and no teacher pension scheme, of course), but our ratios are much higher, and the more senior staff get in the region of 30 grand.

The funding models are very different, but we also receive substantially less money per funded child.

If I give an example that might fit your case. A 2.5 year old joins your setting, bringing their Government funding. They do not have an EHCP, but their needs are such that they need significant provision over and above the norm, for which you have to buy resources, make provision and provide staffing that use up 85% of the funding that you get for that child. You do that, of course, but it reduces the budget that you can spend on the rest of the setting.

Now such children make 17% of your setting - children with significant needs, each bringing, net, only 15% of the funding that you were expecting. Can you still cover all your costs AND provide what they need?

What about if you get a good reputation for your work with challenging children, or your setting is in a deprived area, and those children now make up 30% of your intake. 30% of your children are now only bringing in, net, 15% of the funding that you were expecting. Yes, you can make some efficiencies - you can re-use resources, you can share adults between small groups not individually, you get really good at managing such wide and varied needs. However, you are still significantly poorer than the setting down the road with almost no SEN children, but you still have to pay the same bills.

To be brutally frank, children in schools are numbers rather than individuals. That’s not meaning to sound callous, but you can only really get an individualised education with a tutor. Schools provide group education.

It’s a very good example, and not far off the mark. Local authorities have introduced SENIF funding for exactly this purpose, so settings can claim funding to support children while the EHCPs are applied for. The SENIF funding is not quite £18,500 per year, but it just about covers the cost of 1:1 support for 15 hours at minimum wage.

It was badly needed too. You think kids are challenging when they arrive in schools; imagine what they are like when they are toddlers and (literally) climbing the walls.

If a school can’t help a child to make progress with an additional £18,500 a year allocated to them, the problem is with the school and not the system.

Or perhaps your definition of progress is flawed? Or your data? It’s not entirely clear what you are taking about here?

Well, the poster quoted has already agreed that it isn't £18,500 extra, but £12,500 extra and £6000 that must be found from existing budgets, meaning the school has less money for everything else...

And has also said that schooling is for groups, not individuals, so meeting the individual's needs is not possible or important in the school system... so I agree it's not clear what he / she means.

By the way, schools are also able to claim SENIF funding, but I don’t know if this is over and above the £6000.

I didn’t say that. I said that schools provide group care. Obviously, you do the best you can to meet an individual child’s needs, but they are still a number within a group.

You cant really decide to do something different than the ehcp though. If it says 1:1 support in a mainstream class, you cant decide to set up a mini sen center within the school and do your own thing.
Although secondaries do sometimes set classes and have a set of children who have a lot of sen and they might resource it accordingly.

Our schools notional budget is lower than the cost of the first £6k of all our ehcps, so some of our ehcps are fully funded in an extra top up fund recognising that, but there is then no notional budget for anything but ehcps. We are a small school.

The notional funding given also doesn't reflect the number of children with SEN, it is based on a wide range of sociology economic measures, including deprivation indices, prior attainment models and basic funding. So two schools may have exactly the same " notional funding" but very different numbers of children with additional needs.

But you agree that your statement on funding was wrong?

Have you also considered that what might be wrong with the system is that there are not enough places in special schools, meaning that children are in mainstream schooling with a level of need that really requires a specialist placement (with MUCH more than £12,500 annual funding) but where no space is available?

I’m not sure why we’re suddenly talking about children with EHCPs and additional funding for TAs on a thread about teachers striking for a fully funded pay rise.

Sorry! I think the poster derailed the discussion at the point when they declared that no amount of money could improve the education system at all, because of children's behaviour.....

Sorry. Schools budgets are my favourite subject.