More funding for the education sector?

[chopc]

The government has magicked up / created money to pay people's wages/ support businesses etc - surely it can do the same for the education sector so that it can invest more money in day portacabins and the like to get students back to school?

Ds school wouldn't have enough land to put enough portacabins on, school built to have 1800 pupils, has 2180 pupils due to overcrowding, if classes were 15 pupils, would need 60 portacabins to house up to Y11. The biggest joke is that our education authority has masses of land where they closed schools down & merged schools all standing empty, they knocked the schools down to sell the land but put so many planning restrictions on the land, nobody wants to buy it, we could have had enough school places for smaller class sizes even before the Covid crisis.

Headteachers and governors should be thinking of ways to make things work rather than constantly whinging about how things can't work. How about a bit of proactivity and positive thinking

If the government said to heads, ‘what are your best solutions, money is no object’, that’s exactly what heads would be doing!

Heads can’t decide to rent eg 9 portacabins or the local pub, scout hut or community centre and advertise for/hire 9 additional teachers, as they have NO money in the budget to do that.

The government need to be more positive and have more of a ‘can do’ attitude with increasing their education budget to heads or no schools will be opening further for a long while yet.

What about just writing off this last term and a half, and starting the new school year in January? All go back to how it was before lockdown. Next school year is shortened, no statutory testing, get it back on track.

No one starts school, no one starts university. Hmm... maybe that's got funding issues too.

What would happen with GCSEs?

The government need to be more positive and have more of a ‘can do’ attitude with increasing their education budget to heads or no schools will be opening further for a long while yet.

Or each school should prepare a fully costed plan and apply for funding to make it happen.

We really don't want to go down Labour's scatter-gun approach to spending where money was given and then the recipient was put under pressure to spend it, often very unwisely.

Where can you apply for funding?

The government has already said there is no funding for extra cleaning , for example.

I remember applying for funding once. It took six months to be processed and another six months to receive any of the money.

That is also not how furlough or the Nightingale hospitals worked.

On the applying for funding issue. How about comparing it to the provision of laptops for vulnerable children? That's been an emergency measure, so a proper 'crisis times' comparison.

When did that come out? 20th April. 8 weeks ago.

I don't know any schools in our LA who have had one laptop, let alone the number they asked for.

Soooooo, we need £35k for a portacabin and £25k for a teacher... and we need them both in 10 weeks... hmm...

Or each school should prepare a fully costed plan and apply for funding to make it happen

I don’t think that’s how the Nightingale hospitals were built.

Schools are quite busy at the moment, don’t think they have time to spend ages working out a fully costed plan for funding they will never receive.

Schools I am a governor for are setting their budgets for next year, they are having to cut staff not increase them, and I am talking teaching staff, so having to mix year groups. It is horrendous and depressing.

Were going back on a rota for all year groups in a fortnight. 88% of parents want their child to have a place overall.
I have only one parent saying no and other classes have 100% yes.

Interesting the difference in take up between Wales and England - it's almost as if parents trust the Welsh government to do the right thing by them!! As a comparison.... clown show...

This situation has really highlighted what those of us who work in education already knew - the youth of today are not a priority to this government. They have cut budgets and in turn cut school staff, sold off land to property developers in some areas, crammed our children into rooms that are far too small, increased class sizes whilst removing teaching assistants and expect us to provide a world class education that competes with other countries.

It's an absolute insult and would be funny if it wasn't lives we were talking about.

It's about time this country was progressive when it comes to education. We have a real chance of changing things for the better if they really want to.

Completely agree. With the coming recession, school funding is going to get even worse though. I don't even know how schools are supposed to operate with less funding.

I've been a teacher since mid-way through the last Labour government. There were still unsatisfactory things - stupid initiatives from people who'd never been in a classroom that they changed their mind about after you'd spent a year trying to implement them - but the funding and resources were so much better. Lots of specialist support for SEN pupils, outside training for pupils and staff, good budgets for resources in school, Building Schools for the Future programme, investment in technology. I remember how exciting it was when Smartboards were brought in during my second year of teaching. I am still teaching off a Smartboard that was installed in 2005 in my classroom. We can't afford the subscription for the software any more though, so it's basically functions not much better than a standard whiteboard.

I don’t think that’s how the Nightingale hospitals were built.

How many schools are there compared with Nightingale Hospitals?