School budget cuts- is this normal?

[SummerDuck]

So a letter has come out from DS’s school titled “Plans for the next academic year”. Basically due to teacher pay rises, inflation and government funding freeze, there will need to be changes in how the school operates.

The school are proposing 20 teacher redundancies with the drama and French departments closing. There will be a “reset” of catering provision with reduced staffing and a heat from frozen offer.

School trips are being “paused” while most office staff will go, with teachers picking up some of these tasks. Is this the norm bod for state schools?

This has been going on for years but has ramped up recently. When I began teaching years ago we had Heads of Faculty, heads of department, second in charge of department, lots of teaching assistants and various teaching staff were paid for roles and responsibilities. Gradually, many of these roles have gone. Most of the TA's were made redundant a few years ago, conveniently someone has done a study to say that "Quality First Teaching" is a more effective way to support SEN rather than TA's. Increasingly teachers are not being replaced, class sizes are increasing, subjects like second languages, geology and dance are being taken out of the timetable. The students are really suffering.

@keel34 a Spanish school? Are you in the UK?

@Justplainsadmad no sorry Spanish language teachers! They would usually offer Spanish or French, but they haven't been able to recruit Spanish teaching staff for nearly 2 years so have had to pull for our year 7s (the French teachers were filling in for a while).

There have been a few of these rather convenient findings in education recently.

Class size also doesn't make a difference, apparently.

TAs are absolutely essential for SEN children. Small group sizes are absolutely essential for SEN children too.

Fail to meet the needs of SEN children and a whole class suffers - either because of behaviour or because a teacher has to spread themselves too thin to manage everyone.

'Quality first teaching' is a phrase I am utterly sick to death of hearing at the moment. Not because I don't believe in the concept, but because it's a meaningless phrase.

Some children also require pre-tutoring, post-tutoring and in-class support to access the flipping 'quality first teaching'

Unfortunately the CEO of each Academy does very well. I work in one that isn’t huge , but according to Company House, the CEO earns £155,000. Up until a few years ago, it was a job that didn’t exist. Headteachers were the people that had control but somehow these people that decide to start up the academy and put themselves up as CEO seem to do quite well out of it whilst there is less and less money in school. I’m not a fan. I just want to be a teacher in a school that isn’t being milked by others.

@lifeissweet yes, I agree. I'm also sick of the phrase. I know what good teaching looks like but am finding it impossible to do it under the conditions I am expected to work in at the moment.

@lifeissweet I agree. Quality first teaching is only possible once everyone can put pen to paper. Every child needs something different to put pen to paper. Many SEN kids will need a lot of pre teaching before they can do that. Not to mention the writing slopes and special pens that theres no money for. Not to mention the very bright but poor kids who don't need pre learning but will be sitting with their stomach grumbling after a sleepless night in their cold home.

Yes and this is why we need to get behind the teachers strikes .

it isn’t just about pay

It is not a uniform picture.

I work across a large city in all sorts of schools: nurseries, primaries, secondaries, state, independent, FE colleges...

In some areas, the picture is awful. Some schools are hit really hard because of their cohort and the lack of parental engagement/ ability to pay for things like trips. TAs are being laid off all over the city. Ones that have had hours and hours of training poured into. Their loss will be felt very badly in the next couple of years and it will gradually trickle outwards.

No trips if you can't staff them, for instance.

Some schools are still holding their heads above water and are managing to cut less noticeable things. Again, this will become apparent in the next couple of years when infrastructure is breaking down, resources become dated and, eventually, staff cuts begin to be made there too.

Be under no illusion, if you aren't feeling it yet, it is coming. Your Head will be doing some very creative budgeting to make it less obvious, but there is always a breaking point.

Waiting for that inevitable email I know is coming...

Suddenly being 20 teachers over budget isn't normal no. Neither is using expensive teachers to do admin tasks.

School budgets are definitely under huge pressure but this hasn't happened overnight and sounds like mis- management to me. They should have seen it coming and taken steps much earlier that could have prevented such drastic cuts.

And, Mumtothreegirlies, all of the unions are balloting to strike now, including the Head Teachers, so you'll probably find strikes will come your way too.

Are you expecting a redundancy?

We call them ‘MatesMATs’ - self selected, friendly local schools deciding to work together appointing their own friendly CEO. 🤔

Yes, I agree with you, some shockingly high wages - they do have to publish employees earning above boundaries on their website.

CEO post advertised locally, £145,000 - whilst schools within the MAT had put in place a ‘buy a reading book for school’ scheme for parents to provide!

CEO wages are a bugbear of mine, not just the high wage, but the responsibility that goes with it and the lack of accountability.
A Local Authority assistant director, locally earns £95,000 for oversight and accountability for 280 schools ( and adult learning, inclusion, school transport, school place planning).
The CEO post above is a MAT with 9 schools! Just not comparable! And with very little oversight, certainly not to our democratically elected members of a council

Certainly LA maintained schools have that oversight and forward planning. They are accountable to elected members and have to have any deficit ‘licensed’ by the LA.

In most cases they are headteachers. It seems to me the only real beneficiaries if academisation are the headteachers and senior staff. Definitely the case when they all went as stand alone MATs

I'm a business manager in an LA school of 120 staff. The neighbouring school is a similar size but a stand alone academy. The business manger earns approx double what I do, who gains from that except the individual?

And yet people vote Conservative. Again, and again, and again.

It doesn't matter how aspirational you are, they are not on your side, unless you are already pretty wealthy.

The issue isn't teachers pay. They earn really quite well, and definitely above the UK average. Many experienced teachers are on £45-50k.

In my eyes, the issue is the lack of funding for adequate pay of support staff. Low pay for TAs and support staff means lower quality (sorry but it does, most vacancies attract 2 applicants max in my school). Low quality support = lack of support for teachers and lack of control in the classrooms.

Add to that the chronic underfunding for SEN children, and the placement of children who should be in SEN provisions, in mainstreams, means an even harder class to control and teach.

The government need to invest in SEN properly and increased salaries need to go to TAs and office staff, not just teachers. Improve their environment, improve their job satisfaction.

Problem is, most policy makers probably use private schools, so don't even realise the state schools are in, let alone care to change it.

And I agree with others, this absolutely IS a conservative problem. I almost guarantee Labour would invest much better.

Investing in public services is NEVER a bad thing. Invest to save.

As was said early on, 'normal historically?' - no. 'normal in the 2020s, after 13 years of funding cuts?' - sadly, yes.

Obviously, not evenly spread over ever single school. The way of society at the moment means it is about the gap getting wider and wider.

My secondary teacher friends tell me that their office staff do things like book school trips and coaches for them. In primary, I tend to do all that myself anyway. I wonder if it's that sort of admin task?

Our office staff send out parentmails for us, even though we could do it on our own accounts. Maybe that sort of thing?

I accept it's a different job with different responsibilities but how does spending money like that make anything better for children/education?

I'm not shocked by the cuts at all, this is why teachers are striking so I'm glad in a way that at least the penny is dropping now.

Oddly the school I work in is a one form entry primary school that in September will employ six teachers who are out of class full time.

Does anybody else find that surprising?

I agree with @SchoolShenanigans that lack of TAs is a major cause of stress, the demands made of them for the amount of pay they get is outrageous. We have some amazing ones but they'll leave eventually because they can walk into any other job and get more money and less stress.

This may be the case in secondary where the higher rate of TLR is given, but the absolute max wage available to me in primary at the very top of the pay spine is £43k plus TLR2. I am never getting a pay rise again unless I become a deputy head, which I don't want to do. Feels pretty annoying and quite demoralising to have hit the ceiling a few years ago in my mid-late 30s with no further progression available.

I was talking to our catering manager last week - our canteen is now running at a loss.