Government says parents shouldn't be worried about school funding

[noblegiraffe]

Gillian Keegan, current Education Secretary (you might not know this as there have been a few recently) was just interviewed by Sophy Ridge and said that parents shouldn't be worried about school funding.

School funding has been below 2010 per pupil levels for 13 years now. This has resulted in redundancies of TAs, support staff and teachers. It has resulted in subject choices being cut at GCSE and A-level. It has resulted in the school estate crumbling to the point where some school buildings are officially at 'imminent' risk of collapse, and there have been injuries to children and school staff where ceilings have fallen in.

Headteachers had to make further cuts last summer due to a late-announced unfunded teacher pay rise for September.

There is a shortage of TAs as schools can't hire due to being unable to afford competitive pay levels and TAs are choosing to work in supermarkets instead of schools.

There is a shortage of exam invigilators, again partly due to uncompetitive pay, and the government has been forced to relax ratios to allow exams to go ahead.

There is a shortage of teachers and now this year and next there is a devastating shortage of people training to be teachers, for various reasons including workload and lack of flexible working, but also uncompetitive pay.

Schools are also having to prop up the gaps left by the collapse of local services such as CAMHS and SEN support services who are now largely inaccessible.

We had a pandemic which adversely affected the education of children, and yet school funding levels remain below that of 2010.

How can parents possibly not be concerned about school funding?

I'm not sure what the issue is. We got 0.9% increase in our funding and £70 a head extra for our PP children. We have budgeted for 5% pay rises for staff, 10% increase in supplies and services and a 78% increase in energy costs. Hours cutting and redundancies a plenty round here.

@Freespiritwannabe in all cases I’ve been involved in - it just isn’t a nice situation so tends not to be shouted about. They will try where possible to not make any redundancies and instead just not replace leaving staff…. If a staff know they need to lose two TAs for example then sometimes those that might be retiring anyway soon would take retirement, or sometimes people can rejig roles inside school eg someone leaves from admin team and needs replacing and so one TA might have skills or be willing to move roles type thing. It’s such a long, long process and it doesn’t involve parents at all. You’d just be told staff are leaving at end of year in same way you usually are I suspect.

@MrsHerculePoirot Thanks for your help. I guess the school is OK as they've just shared a job vacancy for a brand new position!

So I guess that's a good sign! 😊 x

I would love to see the school accounts. I just can't see how they're maintaining these staffing levels. What's the brand new position? With 3 admin staff and 14 full time TAs i'm struggling to see why a new role couldn't be shared between the exisiting staff.

Also a dedicated PE teacher in primary school is unusual, even more so considering they only have 150 pupils.

I’m in two minds about this one. Clearly in an ideal world, schools would have buckets of cash. However, there is no bottomless pit of money.

The unions were warned that bumper pay rises could only be funded from within existing budgets yet persisted with their huge demands.

In some ways, it is an opportunity for schools to become more efficient. For example, the number of students with one to one TAs was absolutely unsustainable from a financial perspective.

@MadridPark 🤣when was the last time you set foot in a school? I would love to hear your suggestions for efficiencies!

@Perfect28

Clearly there will need to be difficult decisions made but it’s an opportunity to refocus resources where they can have the most impact. I’m a management consultant and a big part of my role is helping organisations become more efficient.

There is always resistance to change but the vast majority of the clients we work with are able to do more with less and focus on their key priorities.

Thanks for highlighting this Noble. I think people are worried but it's on a long list of worries and overall feeling of hopelessness.

We are seeing the outcomes of a decade of underfunding and grinding down of morale.

Schools have been doing more for less for years.

Awesome. Please, with your expert opinion, suggest some ways schools could 'trim the fat'. Genuinely, i'd love to know.

@Perfect28

One to one TAs, office staff, cleaning, paper use and school kitchens are all areas I’d be looking to cut spending.

1-2-1 TA was the only way my daughter could stay in mainstream schooling whilst she waited 2 years for a place at a SEN school came up.

Would you accept your child being left to flounder in a school that even the authorities recognised wasn't a fit for them? I doubt it.

And that's repeated all over England.

£58.5bn is a lot of money was the main reason. Oh, and the £1000 one-off payment hush money to teachers, which was mentioned so often it was strongly reminiscent of Vote Leave's £350m a week...

You are having an absolute giraffe. There is nothing to trim any longer. Trimmed to the absolute bone in our school.

Explain to me how my autistic year 10 could access any lessons without his one to one. Clue: he can't.
Explain to me which of the office or cleaning or kitchen staff you'd cut.
Explain to me how I do my job without paper.

Thats hilarious.

So support for students with SEND that is legally mandated (btw already cut to the bone, we have one TA per 200ish students), paper that students need to write and draw on (?), Admin staff who literally keep the school running, food for children (many of whom this is their only hot meal each day and is already of poor quality). I think my original comment stands, when was the last time you were in a school? It's like you're imagining an education system that hasn't had its funding decimated for 13 years.

I need not have bothered replying. The reply is so bloody obvious. The worrying thing though is that lots of people think like you.

Suggesting we 'trim the fat' is a joke. What do you think we've been doing for the last 13 years? There's nothing left to trim.

Lord Adonis went around schools to try to find ways that they could make efficiency savings years ago. It's been done. There are no easy cuts left to make after 13 years of cuts.

My school has cut GCSE and A-level options. It has cut TA support staff. It has cut teachers. These all have impacted the quality of education on offer.

This thread's a bit of an eye opener. I knew there were issues with staffing and retention but really shocked to hear about buildings falling apart and just how bad the staffing levels are in some schools. My daughter's in Year 10 so I only tend to know about things she feeds back, so I know they've had to drop a language as they couldn't rectuit a language teacher and that they're a maths teacher down so have supply cover, but don't know about whether or not TAs and support staff have been cut.

Please shout it from the rooftops! Spread the word far and wide! We need more people to know how shit it is! I have a class with 18 pupils, all with SEND, behavioural, emotional or safeguarding issues. We're on the fifth TA of the year. That's one TA for a class in which only a few pupils are capable of any independent work. And that's at a school with an amazing socialist head, who finds money from god knows where. We currently have the best reputation of all state schools in the local area. It is way, way worse at other schools. And we still struggle to find staff. Our cover supervisors are 19yos who finished our Sixth Form last year...

I can't imagine 2 TAs per class, are you sure some of them aren't 1-2-1's for children with EHCPs? DCs school only has class TAs for reception, two TAs ( one of whom is part time) for KS1 and two or three for KS2. There are two TAs in DS's year 6 class, for the two children with EHCPs. Ironically if they had a full time class TA my DD probably wouldn't need an EHCP ( the ongoing battle to get one us a whole other thread!)

When our caretaker left last year we didn't replace them because we are already operating at a deficit. Our HT, AHT and cleaner share the unlocking and locking up of the school every day. We get parents and governors to help out with small maintenance jobs etc. When it was icy recently, our HT had to go into school and spread grit on all the paths before the children arrived.
And, to the PP who suggested cutting the 1-2-1 TAs - if a child has an EHCP, the school HAS to provide 1-2-1 for the hours in the plan. The plan comes with funding BUT the school has to fund the first £6k out of it's existing budget. That's 6k for every child who has an EHCP

We don't even have full time one to one for the kids with that in their EHCP.
Yes we know that's illegal.
But we can't afford them even if they exist. Which they don't.