Primary school asking for 30p per meal for KS1 free meals and asking PTA for money for training teacherS

[Burpeea]

Our primary school is in desperate measures due to dramatically falling roll call due mostly to an unpopular head who puts parents in the village off sending their children there so they go to schools in neighbouring villages instead.
Parents have now been asked to give 30p per meal for KS1 free meals and PTA asked to help with teacher training, parents asked to give £10 cash donation for stationery but head refuses to do an Amazon wish list which the PTA preferred as option.
This makes me uncomfortable but perhaps it is the only way in face of dramatically reduced pupils and therefore budget? I dread to think how they will cover hearing costs this winter. For context this is a fairly affluent rural area.

School budgets are stretched, but I'd see this as a poorly managed school....and I am currently responsible for the finance at 4 schools

Something similar happened in our area with a school that was poorly managed. Eventually they had just one pupil left and were forced to close.

So I'd start looking for alternatives if I were you.

School budgets are absolutely shot.

My dC school got rid of lots of TAs this year, first day back and emails asking for parent volunteers weekly for help with reading to kids, assisting with weekly times table sessions etc.

Schools are in a terrible state.

@User354354 the head at this school got rid of the army of local volunteers when they took over (used to read with kids, manage the garden, help with dinner time). They shut the door to the local community - one of the reasons they are not popular. When my 1st DC joined there were 31 in reception. This year there are 11. Has gone from 7 classes to 5 in 3 years so now he mixed age teacher which teachers weren’t prepared for. The teachers are so great they have taken it on board but so many redundancies

Mixed age teaching - apology!

The PTA will need to check their constitution to see if this is allowed

School budgets are absolutely screwed. Totally fucked. That’s where this is coming from. It’s not going to be for wallpapering the head’s office or buying them a new car.

Have you considered moving too? Schools are struggling but it sounds like a lot of the problems at your school are created by someone who wants to drag down the school with him.

Are schools allowed to ask those on free school meals to pay anything?

Schools are in the shit but asking for 30p for meals is inherently wrong. The school doesn't the meals.

Dts have just started secondary. Art has been dropped from the curriculum and we are being asked told to set up a £20 pm per child standing order to the ptfa. We'll do it, but there are lots who won't be able to and the language is very much that you must.

Schools were asking for voluntary donations way back when I was in primary school.

It's not new, though it does sometimes take people by surprise if they've not come across it before.

They cannot however insist that parents pay (that's the law) and they must have been in quite good (comparative) shape as they've not needed to ask before.

Utterly stupid to have got rid of volunteers, especially in ways that erode community goodwill. Also silly to try to tell PTA how to spend its funds. We all know that school and PTA need to work it out together, so there always will be an element of the school saying what it most needs. But it's still a negotiation, and the school is the supplicant, not the boss.

The head sounds pretty bloody dreadful. Sounds as if a Damascene moment is needed pretty swiftly!

@meditrina thanks for your reply! The head has really sunk the ship I think, the other village schools around us have benefitted from their unpopularity. We have happy DC though so I am loathe to jumped ship yet but lots of our friends have.
i don’t have a child in KS1 but there are some families I know won’t feel they can pay that relatively small surplus so might be embarrassed and stop having meals for their children and that makes my heart bleed when the head is so utterly awful which has led to people piling their children out of the school.

The school did the wrong thing with cutting the community and volunteers out but the rest of it is the Tories shameful acts. This is really bad dire straights when this happens. Fucking hell.

schools get funding per pupil. 11 kids in a class vs 31 is not sustainable. I would be making a plan for potential school closure

@PiffleWiffleWoozle we do have a plan B just in case. I don’t understand how Ofsted could have rated it good a year ago when it is so clearly not thriving. I guess the maths and English must be ok!

The school receives funding for the infant free meals for all that are on the register, whether they take the meal or not. Whilst I would be the first to say that the income to the school for infant free school meals is not large, it will cover the cost providing that there is enough pupils and that is the issue. The school does not have the number of pupils to support the costs. Having said that I think that asking for a 30p donation for free school meals is fundamentally wrong. Same applies to the £10 stationary request.
The school is frankly looking for cost reductions in the wrong places, it has to be in terms of staffing and looking at getting better deals on other things. Accept that the recent pay rises, energy costs and everything else are making balancing expenditure to income very difficult but this is clearly not just a new issue it is a longer term problem of the headteacher and governors not having grasped the reality of their problems.

They don't get funding for everyone on the register whether they have a meal or not, they get funding for the number of pupils who take a meal on census day, which is why well run schools organise special menu days to encourage take up on key dates. It can make a huge difference to the school income.

Could you speak to one of the governors? I'm surprised they're not hauling the head over the coals at the poor management & lack of pupil take-up/recruitment.
My DC are at a tiny village primary (sub 50 pupils total) it is sustainable if the school is managed well, which ours is; in fact we often don't pay much at all for trips/swimming etc because the head is very savvy at running efficiently.

The school meals are supposed to be free so that is wrong.

I am also interested in the request for help training teachers. If student teachers are on a placement in a school then it is my understanding that the university pays the school. That's what happened at my school.

If this is a Local Authority school you should be complaining to them.

Minutes of recent governors' meetings (should be on the website) might be worth looking at. I know school funding is appalling but from what you've said, the head seems to be actively making it worse.

I may have the figures slightly wrong but, as I recall, our lunch provider charged £2.80 a meal whilst we received £2.50 so the school was, in effect subsidising every " free" meal. Something similar may happen in the school mentioned which is why the sum has been requested. ( not that I agree with the request!)

@CaptainMyCaptain the request was for money to spend on teacher training not students. PTA felt they couldn’t say no but feel the money is for general enrichment not staffing costs.

@BlueChampagne the governors stopped posting minutes on website last December having always posted them before.

@APurpleSquirrel that sounds amazing you are lucky! X

When my eldest started primary 44 years ago the PTA wanted to buy supplies for the school. The Head refused, he said PTA money was for extras not things the school should have as it was OK for a nice little school in a fairly affluent area but if schools like his did it what would happen to the schools that couldn't?

I thought he had a good point.

The second year my son was there we had a fantastic Christmas Fayre that raised £3k in one night, massive amount 43 years ago in a school with 200 kids. It was because one dad had gone to university with someone who was flavour of the month on Saturday night TV at the time and he opened the fayre for us and his fans came from far and wide and paid their entry fee and maybe even bought something.

Great right? No there were the most awful arguments about what to spend it on, a big meeting was called with all parents invited to try to sort it out. At the end of about 90 minutes arguing about buying a carpet for KS1 or extra paper towels as someone had calculated children could only wash their hands something like 1.47923 times a day I was heartily bored and suggested we donated it to a big charity appeal, a famine somewhere I think. I nearly got lynched, the Head was my only supporter and miraculously everyone united against us and quickly agreed what to buy. I can't even remember what they bought, I'd lost interest by then.

So back to the point, schools shouldn't have to do this to get essentials and I guess the Head, RIP, was right all along.