School cuts - what on earth can parents do?

[SecretMagicThings]

I’m a parent with children in a primary school. The school’s budget has been slashed and they have had to make a number of support staff and TAs staff redundant. Everyone is upset, parents, staff and students are visibly upset at the end of term. Children will lose out from this and staff morale is rock bottom.

Although a lot of the parents are annoyed, they are annoyed at the headteacher (who had stated this is financial and out of their control) and the Trust. It’s an academy school and although I am no fan of the Trust I don’t think we can entirely blame them for this... but maybe I am wrong?

I haven’t heard anyone (except me!) blame current education policy and story cuts. I find it so disheartening that the same people who are crying in the playground do not seem to link this with their votes in local and general elections. I know people can vote how they want but they seem to think the academies have all the power and none of this is linked to government education and spending policies.

I have written to my MP multiple times but will write again on this issue. I have commented that this is the risks of austerity policies, although of course people can vote how they like. I have complained to the MAT. I am aware this will all do nothing. As a parent I am assuming there is nothing else I can do but wonder if there is?

There are a huge number of expenses that schools incur that have nothing whatever to do with education: apprenticeship levy, paying experts to deal with new data protection rules etc.

All this with reducing budgets.

@Clavinova
I think you've nailed it, a trust in our aerea charges its schools between 8% and 12% of their overall budget for the shared services and as far as I know it should be 4-5%. The result is that our local secondary has a growing deficit and has recently cut 4 GCSE options on top of another 2 it cut a few years back.
The CEO's salary increases by 5K-10K every year and so does the number of directors on higher and higher salaries.
The trust is now looking for an excuse to withdraw.

You're not being naive OP. You only have to read through the educational press for the last 3 or 4 years. Schools have less money. Much less. They are truly struggling.

Three are bound to be a few bad apples in the cart.

What's more teachers are leaving the profession in droves. Some schools will go back in September without a full complement of teachers or with some low quality agency staff.

I think that everybody in education will say that there is an impending crisis over funding and it is true that things are now very tight. All schools are currently waiting for the announcement by the Minister for education about the pay rise for teachers which will be paid from September. The best guess as to what will be offered is 3%, whereas the unions want 5% but this announcement will probably come with no extra funding to pay for the pay rises.
This % figure is in effect a cost of living rise but many teachers will also receive a grade uplift each year early on in their career, which is roughly an extra £1500 a year per grade.
So any school is faced with having to pay substantial extra pay to both teaching and non-teaching staff at the same time as there is no extra funding coming into the system. Schools are not officially allowed to go into debt. So there then becomes an interesting and difficult decision for the governing board. Do they not pay the extra pay awards to teachers and non-teaching staff or do they pay the extra pay, knowing that the reality is that this will then precipitate redundancies if the school can even afford to make people redundant.

Mishappening, it is stuff like this that annoys me too, so much red tape and bureaucracy meaning schools cannot spend money and time on actual teaching or enrichment for the children. Yet labour also seemed to screw up education when they were in power so maybe there is no hope for the future :(

admission .

@SecretMagicThings I don't honestly think schools spent much money on red tape. Around 80% of a school's expenditure is on salaries and other staffing costs such as pensions. That leaves a mere 20% for other essentials such as insurance, staff training, maintenance, electricity etc, computers, books....

Perhaps I phrased it wrong, I suppose I meant things like any fees they pay to the Trust, GDPR experts etc. Also not so much money but all the time teachers have to spend planning and marking.

I think teachers probably do have a lot of form-filling and extra paperwork to do.

Although marking and lesson planning are core parts of the job.

They don't get paid extra to do it though. They work silly hours during term time.

Oh no I am fully aware they don’t. I wouldn’t be a teacher with all the stress amd awful hours and pointless paperwork for all the money in the world.

Nor me!

Another aspect of this that doesn't often seem to get considered, is the subtle effect of either asking parents to pay a contribution or accepting it when offered. IMO it is beginning to shift the relationship between the school and the parents, in the direction of a private school model. In some cases, parents who have either made generous contributions or given up a large amount of time fundraising for a school, believe that this should give them leverage, and an influence over how that money is spent (I'm not aiming that at you highclerelass, you sound lovely ). Some parents give that help with a consciously ulterior motive; other times it's more subconscious. But I think in some cases you end up with a situation where an already beleaguered SLT trying to run a school with no budget now has the additional complication of a vociferous parent body who want a greater than normal say in how the school is run (without understanding the issues). Along the lines of, 'we've raised 10 grand this year which is enough to fund a TA, and we think there ought to be a TA in X class - you need to justify why you're not spending the money in that way'. I'm not saying that's always the case, but I've seen it happen in more than one local school.