To ask what budget cuts your schools are making?

[GoldenRetriever4]

So DS3 is in year 4 at a large state school in quite a leafy area. A letter from the head cane home yesterday talking about the school’s challenging budget situation due to a combination of inflation, teacher pay rises and government funding freeze.

Basically, the situation is now so severe that a lot of cuts are going to come in from September. A lot of staff are going- the school office is going from 4 staff to 1 and TAs are being cut to statutory minimum with 5 being cut. The school kitchen will be closing and meals will be prepared from frozen by staff on a rota basis.

School trips are being slashed and they are also talking about reducing cleaning staff. The upshot is that teachers will be expected to pick up a lot more slack with admin and support tasks.

Is this normal now for state schools? Are your schools doing similar?

I hope the teachers will refuse to take on cleaning and food preparation and will involve their unions.

We have cuts, but none involving staff cooking/cleaning.

The teachers have every right to refuse and involve the unions if necessary.

Teachers leaving and not being replaced - bigger classes.

Number of TAs cut significantly. SEN children only being supported for funded hours.

Office staff cut.

Residential trips won't happen as so many parents don't pay and we can't afford to subsidise them.

Head, who hasn't taught for 15 years, will be teaching some lessons.

Routine maintenance on hold for at least another year.

Cleaners and midday staff - reduced numbers but mostly because we can't recruit them.

DC's well-run state secondary school is proposing to increase class sizes from 30 to 32 in this September's intake in an attempt to balance the budget deficit caused by the underfunded pay rises and general increased costs. They would rather not do this but the alternative would be to slash support staff which was felt would be even more detrimental to the quality of education.

school 1 (over a 3 year period)
Reduced Senco time from 3 days to 1 day
Reduced deputy head time from 1 day to .5 of a day
Reduced office cover by 30 hours
Reduced TA from 1 in every classroom all day to 1 per year group, morning only. Apart from eyfs due to ratios
Sen TAs as per ehcp
Lunchtime cover reduced and no play leader so no nurture room
Home school link worker from afternoons to one afternoon
Cleaning and caretaking unaffected
Kitchen unaffected

School 2
Reducing TA time to mornings only
Sharing a head and bursar with another school so only part time on site
Office not manned in afternoons.
Caretaker now does cleaning and reduced hours
Catering out to tender

Yep, this is pretty standard - although a lot to do in one go.
And is why teachers are striking for a funded payrise - school budgets just can't stretch to paying staff more without any more money.

Not as of yet - budget's not quite at the point of tipping over into deficit and these cuts needing to be made, so the ones that are, are at the level of retiring staff being replaced lower down the pay scales at present. Got about another year or so before it gets to squeaky bum time in the budget.

Staff leaving. Enrichment program cut. Parents expected to continue more. Building looks like it's about to fall down. Result is that behaviour is poor kids feel unvalued and it's a vicious downward spiral.

In some ways I’m glad the school are focusing their cuts on ancillary areas although I don’t envy the teachings and support staff having to add a whole list of new tasks to their roles.

Apparently the lunch offer will be mainly cold serve with one hot dish cooked from frozen.

Wow that’s sad. I think we benefit from being an academy (basically a business ?). We’ve just had a new science center and 2 new playgrounds added.

Our school bus, it’s heavily subsidised but still costs parents more than £5 a day, the bus is needed because of where the school is situated, it’s bus or be driven, we chose the school because of the bus, we can’t move as going into final year (fortunately) I feel sorry for anyone with DC starting out in school.

We’ve just had new playgrounds, garden update and new clubs

Not an academy, maybe through the parent events - many fairs etc which are well attended

Maybe it’s the area / parent stuff as seems to go against grain

None that I'm aware of.

But we're not in England

A third of primaries, all but one special and the majority of secondary have a deficit budget which will grow over time.

Local primary is in the process of a ‘restructure’ - posh word for redundancy - cutting 15 staff - 6 teachers, 1 admin and the rest in teaching assistants.

And following on from above has already not replaced the assistant head who left last year.

Luckily not the school I'm in now but I was made redundant from my previous school (office) as were three others of the 5 office and finance staff. They have one office and one part time finance left and, with other cuts they made the school is an absolute mess.

Over a period of years teachers made redundant, no school nurse, less admin staff, no lunch time supervisors so staff volunteers who are paid. Head tried to make all teachers cover lunch duty but regional union came in and reminded him we are not paid at lunchtime so couldn't make us. We all teach more hours. Staff morale is low.

Having teachers doing cleaning and dishing up dinners sounds awfully familiar.

Teacher redundancies, hence significantly increased class sizes.

Many TA redundancies, as school couldn’t afford to keep them. We now only have TAs for children with SEND funding. The funding is not sufficient to meet the needs of the children, so those children struggle when unsupported/ sharing TAs.

Budgets for classroom equipment and books are so tight that I’m buying pencils /pens / glue sticks etc for the children myself. I have to buy the books we use in our reading and writing schemes.

We can’t afford sufficient books for our maths scheme, so we have to spend hours per week copying the sections that children need individual versions of.

We can’t afford to recruit sufficient lunch supervisors, so teachers are doing unpaid duties (voluntarily).

National Tutor Programme is only partially funded by government, and only approved providers can be used, so this is a huge cost.

Routine maintenance delayed.

Subjects with smaller numbers are being cut, especially in creative arts. Therefore curriculum, especially at GCSE level is more narrow.

Upper sets in subjects like Maths have 40 students in them.

Increasing use of TAs instead of proper teachers to cover long term absence and short term absence.

Fewer students offered single sciences and languages.

Only employing early career teachers who are just qualified and encouraging older more experienced and expensive teachers to leave.

Less support for children with SEN, meaning more teacher time is needed, and less teacher inout for everyone.

Less admin support/caretaking/cleaning. Teachers have to do more of this stuff meaning less time for preparation and marking. When teachers have do more of the admin roles other tasks, they rightly don’t just add loads of extra hours to their days. The time comes out of time they’d spend planning and marking. They have had real term pay cuts of close to 20% over the last 15 years and although they’ve been willing to go above and beyond, goodwill is running thin and lots of teachers are leaving as the lack of funding makes everything harder and harder.

It might appear that ancillary stuff is being cut, but if parents knew the teacher time per head that students are receiving, compared to a few years ago, they would be shocked. With larger classes and more lessons not having a teacher in them, it’s a significantly poorer education than a few years ago.

Schools generally don’t like to tell parents. They present a good front, struggle on and paper over the cracks whilst they can. The difficulty is that the cracks are becoming so large that they are more and more evident. I think it’s good that the school has been honest about the position. Hopefully parents will write to their MP and complain and not blame the school.

Very few parents really know about funding or all the ways their children’s education is being impacted or how things are worse than a few years ago.

No cuts at the schools I use although they have opened donations for things like SEN fund or trips which were free previously. I'm happy to contribute tbh

Although I know schools in London are suffering from falling rolls & are closing or have closed (primaries)

It seems odd to cut office staff & TAs as they are much cheaper then teachers & won't impact the budget as much.

This! I know of teachers who have had to take on the role of office admin because there wasn’t one (whilst trying to teach!) and cleaners as well as teach full time. Can’t believe they weren’t rushing to their union for this.