Why do some schools face budget cuts, and some schools don't?

[liankian]

I’ve just received an email from my son’s primary school. It said the school is facing budget cuts. That they now don’t have allocated funding for library upgrade and class furniture.

Meanwhile, I asked a friend of mine. Her children are also at primary level, but it seems their school is just fine.

Actually, my friend’s school is located in a richer area and is rated as an outstanding school. While my son’s school is only rated Good.

I was wondering whether these two factors – the school’s geographical area and its ratings – have an impact on the school’s funding.
Could you pls explain?
Thank you

Going back to my earlier comment - schools that federate have a school bus between the two!!! It saves a great deal of money and it needs to be done much more. We live over 2 miles from school and transport was provided. I can't see this is an insurmountable issue but reduces costs and means other schools don't lose even more money.

Where I am a Governor (primary) we have teachers doing lots of CPD. Longish lists at every GB meeting. Definitely not disappeared in my LA.

"Going back to my earlier comment - schools that federate have a school bus between the two!!! It saves a great deal of money" it only saves money if both schools had a bus before they federated. Not many schools here have a bus so no saving to be made.

"if the school are making 15 teachers redundant, then that means that they are going to be saving £450,000 a year minus the redundancy costs, possibly more". Our nearest secondary is facing a cut of over half a million pounds so even though they currently have a surplus budget it is nowhere near enough to make up this shortfall.

MRZ, the question is whether the £500K cut is real this year or whether it is what is being projected as the extra funding the school needs to find up to 2020-21 finance year. I suspect strongly it is the latter and that means things can be done to mitigate. Maybe the first decision is to say no pay rises till 2020. Not popular but this will actually mean that the school needs to find less extra funding and gives them a chance and time to consider other ways of making cuts.

Noblegiraffe, the honest answer is that nobody knows but if the school was setting budgets that were realistic and did not end in a deficit, then at least they have a chance of getting to a balanced budget without recourse to redundancies in the future. If they are already in a deficit situation and living beyond the available funding it is inevitable that staffing will have to be a major area for cuts.

We are not in a deficit situation. Our school has been very careful, some might say incredibly stingy, over the years. Even with staffing becoming cheaper by 2020, we have a relatively old staff (I'm youngest in my department at 38!) and are expecting retirements, we are heading towards deficit. We have been hit hard by the changes to sixth form funding and the contact time has gone done in year 12. It is not as simple in most secondaries as you are trying to make out.

"this will actually mean that the school needs to find less extra funding" says so much!

No its about realism. Much as I would like more funding into schools, I suspect we are not going to see any till 2020.
So the decision that has to be made is whether staff want their expected 1% increase per year or whether you want to try and stop staff being made redundant by accepting no inflation pay rise and hope that along with sufficient other savings the financial gap can be bridged.

How far will a pay freeze go toward a half million pound deficit? Reality check!

Which would have the opposite effect here as the staff would leave ( there are plenty of jobs available locally and the recruitment situation is dire) and we would end up paying over the odds/retention bonus for supply staff!

mrz if staffing costs already take up 80% or more of income, then a 1% hike each year will have an impact on increasing the deficit. The government expects staffing costs to be between 55-70% but this is rare particularly in schools with long serving staff with contractual pay progression. admission is speaking a lot of sense, even if it may sound unpalatable.

If staff quit and need to be replaced, then advertising and recruitment costs will wipe out any gains made by not valuing existing staff.

Admission no inflation pay rise here,no pay progression for younger staff, increases in the number of teaching periods and still 7 teaching redundancies this year-

Admission would probably say that the need for redundancies is evidence of prior financial mismanagement. I'm not sure how many more heads need to go public in the papers saying that this is the route they are forced to take as the money is inadequate before some people will admit that there's a problem.

AndNone i'll repeat my question how far will freezing staff pay go towards alleviating a half million pound budget cut? Your answer seems to be that it won't even scratch the surface merely not make the deficit any larger, which is a good thing but hardly solving the insurmountable problem. Sticking fingers in dams comes to mind.

"Over two-thirds (71 per cent) of secondary respondents reported that their school has already cut teaching posts, compared with 31 per cent of those in primary schools. Natural wastage was identified as the main way in which posts have been cut.

Overall, 50 per cent said they have been forced to increase class sizes, with the proportion rising to 70 per cent for secondary respondents. Sixty per cent of secondary staff said their school has cut the range of non-English Baccalaureate subjects.

In addition, 41 per cent said their school has cut special educational needs provision."

www.tes.com/news/school-news/breaking-news/our-school-ethos-now-based-cost-cutting-teachers-reveal-true-impact

Indeed, the opportunities for development beyond the somewhat pointless EBacc (we have had students with 14 A* in 'proper' subjects who don't get EBacc) are what is suffering. These subjects are just as important.
Another problem with secondary is that schools will cut expensive non-EBacc subjects like Tech. This is ridiculous. We need more, not less, STEM provision.

Rumours going around suggest ministers are going to try to buy support for grammars in exchange for more school funding

schoolsweek.co.uk/unions-wont-go-easy-on-grammar-plans-to-win-funding-deal/

Or....we could just fund the schools we already have appropriately and stop wasting money on vanity projects!

Wish there was a like button

MRZ, is the £500000 you are referring to a current deficit or is it what you think the school is going to have to find over the next 3 years.
If it is the former then I can only ask the question how has the school managed to run up a £500K debt without doing something about it.

If it is the amount of extra funding that you may need over the next three years then actually the amount for the first year is £166,666. An average size secondary school gets about £8M in funding of which somewhere between £6.5M to £7M will be staffing costs. 1% of £7M is £70000, which is roughly a third of the way to the expected need, so not just scratching the surface.

Lucycat,
Fully accept the situation at your school but without knowing the background it is difficult to comment further other than to ask how long has the school been running a deficit budget.

1% of a salary of (say) £40,000 is £400. An advert in TES costs from £789. We had to pay £4000 agency fee to convert a supply teacher to a permanent one. It might be cheaper to pay the 1%!!

Exactly. We've had to readvertise a position. That's a lot of money on nothing when there are departments that cannot afford to replace text books.

Federated schools have one Head! The saving is in the leadership costs. Why would every small school need a Head? There does need to be a dose of realism! The LA provides the bus - not the schools!

Federation might be a cost saving exercise for some schools but not for all ( and we are federated!)