Funding may not be the issue in schools?

[damnedifyoudodammedifyoudont]

I know lots of threads already exist on VAT, and this isn't another; putting aside that, does anyone think more money into education (beyond recovering the real terms cut in budgets / covering pensions) isn't the issue?
My (?) unpopular opinion is that teacher burnout and money not stretching have more to do with people's expectations of the service, not the budget.

People have gone from expecting an essential service to education to requiring it to cover parenting, pastoral care, and more. While I see value in some of this, where does parenting stop and school start?

When free education was developed, schools didn't need entire departments dedicated to mental health and pastoral care.

How can we continue to pay for these things and keep the fundamentals going?
I'm not saying we shouldn't have these services, but where does it stop?

This can be applied to the NHS and possibly other government services too.

What do others think?

One thing I also noticed when I came back here was the level of interference by the school in our lives. I was quite shocked by it. I can’t quite explain what it was, but I definitely felt it. It is like the state is responsible for your DC, not the parent. It felt like a wedge between me and my DC. It just felt different to when I was overseas, and the school did a great job, but you dropped them off and picked them up, and there was no interference. Even now, I feel the teachers at my DC’s school overstep the mark and do things which is not their job. Whether that is their choice I don’t know. I think maybe it is the state who has told them it is their responsibility to look out for issues as parents are doing such a terrible job.

So, I agree. There is a blur between where parenting ends and school starts. An overlap. It takes resources away from the school when what they should be doing is teaching, not parenting.

Parental support can make a huge difference.

Funding is also required but no good just throwing it at schools if you don’t throw it at other services too.

I think we need to reframe what education is for.

It is not just about passing exams but about getting life skills, being 'oven ready' for the adult world.

This is a complex notion. In our broken society (and it is broken) many people are unable to provide all this for their children in the home setting. This could be because they have never been taught themselves or because the pressures of their lives do not allow them to do it. I am applying this theory to all levels of society. There is significant neglect in many affluent families.

So - if what we need as a society is citizens who can contribute tax and have fulfilling lives then we need to provide supports to help them get there. At the moment it is schools who are filling the gap. It is actually difficult to imagine a body better placed to do this given the time they spend with our children.

One of my Dc has moderate learning disabilities. In the 80's/90's when I was at school he would have been at special school for definite. Now he is in mainstream. He started school in nappies and didn't have an ehcp until year 3. My youngest has autism. He's 10 but with the emotional development of a 3 year old. He's in mainstream too. In my area there are 2 special needs schools and neither take children who are academically able. You have to go to private specialist school at a huge cost to the LA or struggle in mainstream.

We need Camhs to work properly, waiting list for asd/adhd assessments to be a few months maximum, not years. Also we have to remember that some children struggle for years before being allowed to join the waiting list. One of My son's was showing symptoms of autism aged 1. I was robbed off for years but he finally got on the waiting list aged 14. He is now 16 and still on the waiting list. We need the nhs to see children with medical issues promptly, not have children waiting for 9 months to get grommets. We need sure start and We need early help and the family intervention service to work properly. We need social services to work too. We need proper support for young carers.

We need more TAs, more pastoral support, more equipment. We need affordable school uniform and we need the threshold for pupil premium and free school meals to be higher. £7k household income is ridiculously low.

We also need more respect for school staff and other professionals. So many times on here I've seen people criticising health visitors or nursery staff or schools. Now we have Google we think we know more than someone who has a degree and years of training and experience.

It's not a schools issue. The problem is systemic, this was identified in the 1990s and measures were put in place to address it holistically rather than just throwing funding to patch up the holes where they appeared. Ignore Iraq, focus on the manifesto that Blair-Brown came in with and it's focus on Education, Education, Education. The investment made in early years and parenting support alongside broader changes in education.

It was entirely predictable that subsequent austerity cuts that stripped out Sure Start, support services for children and young people, support services for new parents, etc. from the system would lead to cascading problems in parenting skills, child development, behaviour, resilience and ability to cope, mental health, etc. over the next decade.

Covid was just the icing on the cake - throw a major stressor at the population 5+ years after you stopped providing them with the skills and support to be able to cope. This just accelerated a decade of decline into 3 years.

If measures were put in place next week, it will still be a decade for the current problems to work their way out of the system, and there will still be a forgotten generation working their way through life without the skills that should have been taught and developed from pre-school. And this generation is going to need extra support to help them become better parents in turn.

Some of this but by no means all, is that children go to school very early in the UK. The little boy next door will be attending school in September aged about 4 1/2, in my view he shouldn't have to go till Christmas when he'd be rising 5 and just more adept at everything.
The cutlery/nappies thing is awful. I don't know why parents can't get sorted but there obviously needs to be much more support for them, Surestart centres etc. Some of it is social change. I would have been ashamed to send a child in nappies to school but some people are not. Do we exclude the child? Dunno, they are possibly better off in school.

Yes.
Surestart was a massive loss.
One of the funniest things I heard was how thenpsrents accessing it weren't the ones that needed it.
Whilst I agree there were issues with engaging some hard to reach groups, I’m absolutely sure that those yummy mummies that thought that had it all down also benefited from those services.
They were a huge loss and the conservatives are touting a system that sounds like them in their manifesto!
I agree there is no easy fix

I agree.
Many parents expect schools and teachers to do much more than teach and support - they expect them to parent for them.
Expecting SEN support in schools is perfectly reasonable, that's not what I am referring to with my comment above.

We don't need to hand parenting over to teachers.

@Sharptonguedwoman children go to school quite early in this country, but in many countries where formal education starts later most children will go to some form of nursery for a few years before school.

I think Switzerland encourage walking to school independently as early as 4yo, and yet we can’t teach our children to use cutlery at that age

I have seen a change in the last 2 weeks here - our local primary went from Requires Improvement to Good and is now doubling its TA workforce from 1 per class to 2 per class. All full time and paid by the Academy.

People are falling over themselves to apply for the TA roles as NMW is expected to go up with Labour (some say £12 PH and some say £15 PH).

People are leaving their office jobs to be term time only. I’m tempted myself having been a TA before. Current NMW is quite good and it means I don’t lose much in pay!

But yes, racism and aggression in Year 5 and 6 is bad here as well.

Can only agree.

Wow
I wonder how one school can afford 2 TAs and a other none.
My son’s school had 2 TAs in year R back in early 2010s and it was immensely successful as a strategy, but they did it by having 0.5 per class TAs in year 1 and 2.
I do think more input early is key. As well as raising aspiration later on. Genuinely - not just paying lip service through career days but instilling and inspiring children with the possibilities and opportunities and showing how they realteto life and careers throughout the curriculum.

I disagree with you. I don’t think it’s an ‘expectation’ problem but a funding issue. And not just a funding in education problem but a cut in every single public service over the last several years. It’s an ongoing austerity problem.
For families everything is worse now than ever. I read yesterday that 1 in 3 children in the UK are now living in relative poverty!!

Life for many families is desperate.
Cost of living/housing is ridiculous.
A global pandemic.
Cuts to education and NHS funding getting worse year on year.
Services like Surestart cut.
Climate crisis looming.

I detest the notion that all problems in society/schools are a parenting issue. It lets us off the hook at looking at what the real issues are. Yes behaviour is a problem, yes too many SEN kids are not suited to mainstream, but until we address the root causes of these issues and until services are properly funded then yes schools unfortunately will have to pick up some pieces.

I think you may be referring to later phases.

It's interesting that the most successful community support schemes are almost always community led. But politicians hate the lack of control/accountability, so inevitably change schemes to be centrally controlled and impose greater restrictions on how funds are allowed to be spent, and the benefits achieved start to decline as a consequence.

ifs.org.uk/articles/sure-start-achieved-its-aims-then-we-threw-it-away

I think part of the issue is the creation of MATs and how money is used within them. You can have a CEO on £200k, plus non-teaching SLT on all larger salaries, which leaves less money for teaching staff (I include TAs in that) and additional things that children need. That's why schools now prefer to get in NQTs (ECTs) and school-based trainees and get rid of their more expensive, experienced teachers. That means all that experience of behaviour management and dealing with complex issues etc. is gone.

Plus, yes, all the access to Sure Start gone and no investment in Early Years. This will massively impact families and then change in parent and children behaviour and mindset doesn't change.

It's a massive, massive issue and is going to take years to sort out. Meanwhile, all the Tory buddies are swanning off with their millions of tax payers' money for doing squat.

@SallyLovesCheese the theory with MATs is that the money that goes towards the central team including CEO salary matches the amount that was siphoned off by LEA with top slice and service level agreements that state maintained schools have to pay.

Some MATs are huge with large number of employees, pupils, estates. You wouldn't get CEOs with similar level of responsibilities in other organisations getting paid less than CEOs of MATs.

I'm not convinced that the numbers of MAT SLT and the salaries they are on across all MATs in an old LEA equal the previous numbers of LEA senior staff and their salaries.

But a main driver of Sure Start was to mix social classes- so they were intended in the day care to have middle class children as well on the grounds that they raised expectations and provided role models. It was part of the social mobility strategy.

@SallyLovesCheese the direction of travel (certainly under Conservative Government) is to increase the size of MATs so pretty much half the number of current CEOs, with mergers etc. Will be interesting o see if Labour carry on this trend. Ultimately we may end up with similar to LEAs but more likely to be spread across a larger geographical area

Mat costings tends to be cheaper because of the economy of scales.
Maintained Schools will be paying for the same provision and some LA provision usually at a higher rate.
Some Mats charge more for schools needing more support and less for better schools that support others. They all vary.

For our schools, the issue is the growing needs of children and parents that place additional strain on the workload. CIN, CP, CME, FGM, judicial reviews. MH support, paying bills advice, growing amount of appeals and exclusion costs, rising costs of meals and chasing up money for meals, trips, damage, children not collected, home visits, missed meetings, assaults, safeguarding outside of school time, DV, home food packages, SS meetings, data requests, staff absence through assault and illness and OT costs, and the complexities of school life has grown and are completely different to ten years ago. These needs are real and can not morally be ignored and the majority of parents work with school well in my experience. But having one or two unreasonable parents makes work difficult. and unpleasant. Education is not the same as it was even three years ago, it is changing at a fast pace.
If you want to keep excellent experienced staff it will cost you more.

I work in an inner city school and it isn’t just an SEN issue. There is also a huge fine motor skill issue, socialising issue and resilience issue in schools.

Funding is an issue because children need SEN support, pastoral support, some physical support, interventions and behaviour management. There is also four times the amount of parental engagement than 20 years ago. I think both can be true. I have done more parenting in schools than I ever thought I needed to.

Agree. 2 of my teacher friends have now left and the remaining one is hanging on by a thread. All primary school teachers, dealing with low-level disruption from maybe half the class, verbal abuse from a third, violence from 1 or 2 kids, and then the minority that want to learn but aren't because of the others. And this is every day. It's not a minority of pupils, it's the majority of them.

I don't know how we've gotten here. I know that I work with naice MC people who all seem to think parenting has nothing whatsoever to do with them - it appals me the things I hear them chatting about.

It's not either or. It's a budget problem and lots of other problems.* *