To feel worried about city schools losing huge sums from their budgets?

[minifingerz]

here

My dc's school isn't listed here, but one just down the road looks set to have its budget reduced by £892 per pupil per annum by 2019.

This is because the government has decided that the right way to address the very serious and devastating under funding of schools outside of our major cities, is to even out the funding across all schools, rather than actually increase the education budget over all. This means that schools like the one my children go to are going to have to shed probably a couple of dozen teachers and most of their support staff.

Meanwhile half the government send their own children to private schools where the spend per head is roughly double the spend which they believe is appropriate and acceptable for a state educated child.

I could cry. I feel so worried about my dc's school. Half the teachers are already barely coping with their workload, my youngest dc has got ASD but no EHCP and no allocated support and I just feel really gloomy about the future of their education.

Can anyone cheer me up?

But your school will have had years of extra funding. Other schools have survived for years being underfunded,yours will too.

Many won't want to pay more taxes as many non families are already struggling.

Non wealthy

The financial crisis was finally triggered by a real estate problem with non-performing subprime loans at the base of it, absolutely, but UK banks were exposed to poor lending all on their own too (remember, Northern Rock had a run on it exactly a year before Lehman Brothers went tits up) and had a big hand in the asset price inflation here which funded consumer credit spending.

The Labour government and BofE knew all about it coming (or at least they should have done - Vince Cable even wrote a book about it for them) but depended on consumer spending to keep the service economy outside the City alive and stand any chance of getting re-elected in 2010. Consumer spending - whether funded by income or more realistically equity withdrawal - here is driven by confidence, which correlates closely to house price rises, which correlates to loose Bank lending.

Canada took steps to protect itself and its banking system. The UK didn't.

None of this really affects the scale and depth of the UK structural deficit which we now have to deal with. Gordon Brown saw bankers getting rich and wanted to redistribute it to the poor so that everyone could share in the increasing wealth that the bankers produced. There is nothing I disagree with about that (it may surprise some, but I have never voted Tory in my life). But he passed on far more than he took, including a lot to some decidedly middle class earners, and borrowed to make up the rest on a day in, day out basis - a position which no-one has been able to extract us from to this day.

Compared to the structural deficit - the shortfall of tax revenue compared to non-cyclical, day to day public spending commitments - the actual cash outlay in the bank bailout of £133bn was really a drop in the ocean, and it seems that a substantial proportion of that is likely to be clawed back through the sale of bank shares anyway. It is convenient for anti-bankers to quote the far higher figure of £1.2trn, but that is the total guarantee figure the government made - almost all of it has never been shelled out as cash.

I'm not sure, makeourfuture whether economists dislike comparing countries to households but I'm an economist and don't have a problem doing it to illustrate the issue. The current government is absolutely boxed into a corner. They were left with this eye-watering debt, a public not prepared to be taxed any more, and a financial market that was unwilling (or unable) to lend to them because there is genuine concern that they won't get paid back. The debt is rising all the time because of the interest as it is. Unfortunately it's not a choice of cutting schools or hospitals, defence or foreign aid. It's all of them.

What may be true is that for the average Brit, the entire increase in living standard between 2000 and 2008 was illusory. It was borrowed, and we are now having to pay it back.

I'm afraid I don't have sympathy either as my DC's rural school has been comparatively underfunded for years. I think that, in the current financial year, the spend per pupil after costs for staff, utilities etc was something like £90 per pupil. And it is expected to get worse next year. That's £90 to spend on books, IT, arts & craft, sports equipment etc. Just because we can see fields & trees, doesn't mean to say that we don't have children with additional needs or children with English as an second language. About 8 TAs were made redundant a couple of years ago & parent volunteers help out in the office, on playground duty & that sort of thing. The governors & SLT live in dread of something breaking as they have no means of replacing it. In some ways, I am paying more tax as we are asked to make voluntary donations to the school (preferably monthly direct debit!) as well as have the usual school expenses of uniform and trips and encouragement to support PTA fundraisers.
I wish you school didn't have to have its funding cut; more than that though, I wish that our school and other underfunded schools (West Sussex is even worse) could have their budgets raised to match yours. I agree with all of Others economic points.