Impact of new cuts to state school funding

[Novotelchok]

There are a lot of headlines just now about further cuts to state school funding - through inadequate central government funding of pay rises & NI increases, and pupil premium not going up enough. I'm not in England so only know what's in the papers - I'd be very interested to hear how this is impacting schools/ children / families.

I'm not a journalist, just an interested parent & a voter who is pretty worried by what seems to be Austerity 2.0.

Because PIP is designed to meet the costs of disability and if you means test it people might find themselves worse off in work than they are out of it.

Also lots of disabled people use their PIP to pay for things that allow them to work. Like someone who experiences serious pain and fatigue might use their PIP to pay for a cleaner which then allows them that bit more energy to hold down a job, prepared meals because they're too exhausted to cook etc. Take their PIP and if they can't afford the help without it they may well have to stop work and then they're claiming UC and PIP and have needlessly lost their job. They then become a drain on the state when previously they may have been a net contributer.

!

Yes, family member is a teacher. Changed school in September, last school was a large secondary with attached primary (only 2 schools in the ‘group’). Had a Chief exec (£220k+), COO (200k+), 2 heads (100-150k) and 4 deputy heads (2x pastoral and 2x academic) (80k+++). The deputies did a session or two a week. So many teachers were heads of department/year reducing the sessions actual teachers were teaching and giving them 5-10k extra.
Can’t say the new, smaller, school sounds much better, as all schools seem to have a highly paid management team who spend more time preserving the ‘way we do things’ than improving teaching!

They are trying to improve attendance, giving parents a larger window to drop of children with the bribe of a piece of a cheap high carb breakfast (don’t kid yourself these clubs will provide anything more than cheap toast and cereal). None of this is about feeding children!

Can't do much for 60p including paying staff! Cereal will be a stretch quite frankly. Bridget needs to go.

How many manager type roles were there in LEAs? When I was a governor at state maintained school we paid a top slice of our funding to LEA plus had various service level agreements with them. We were paying quite a few salaries with the money we were handing over

If they lose the court case I can't see her staying

A local Private school with 300 pupils is closing in September.
There are quite a few pupils who go there with SEN who are funded by Leeds City Council.
Really sad
Other local Private schools have offered to step in but as they are outside Leeds Council area the funding can't be transferred

And yet Labour sit there and laugh!
I will never ever forgive them

The press in all sides are joining you. Certainly loathed this morning.

@crumblingschools
Research shows that multiacademy trusts take more of a top slice and spend more on back end functions and less on teachers and resources in schools. There is also no evidence that they raise standards. In fact, LEA schools have slightly better Ofsted reports, do better for disadvantaged students and have less teacher turnover.
If the taxpayer wants value for money, then we need to return schools to LEAs when it is shown that multiacademy trusts are performing badly or spending too much on CEOs salaries, hotels, cars, marketing etc. Taxpayer's money is being wasted and this money should be spent on frontlune staff. Less leaders and more teachers will also make teachers less likely to leave the profession.

There is also no evidence that they raise standards. In fact, LEA schools have slightly better Ofsted reports, do better for disadvantaged students and have less teacher turnover.

That’s a bit misleading as schools that do badly and have poor Ofsted reports are more likely to have been turned into academies because that’s the ‘solution’ to failing schools.

https://schoolsweek.co.uk/investment-areas-scheme-binned-by-labour/

“As part of our plan for change, we have made it our mission to tackle the baked-in inequalities that remain in our education system – taking a more targeted approach to ensure no child is left behind.”

It's all just buzz words.

What are these 'baked-in inequalities'? Not saying there aren't inequalities in state education as there are loads, but I can't find 'baked-in inequalities' defined anywhere.

How is anything in their SEN plan (and I use the word plan loosely) going to ensure no child is left behind when there are thousands left behind right now?

@noblegiraffe
The UCL report says that researchers found that "there is no positive impact on the attainment and progress scores of pupils in MATs when compared to equivalent non-MAT schools" based on "like-for-like comparisons."

The Education Policy Institute writes, "there is no identifiable general optimal organisational structure for school groups. We cannot conclude that, based on performance alone, the MAT structure should be preferred to the local authority model, or vice versa."

MATs cost more than LEA schools so if they do not improve performance then they are not good value for money.

The Education and Skills think tank says, "MATs do not publish details of how much money they distribute to their schools .....which makes it impossible to know if every pupil in a MAT has received the DfE’s guaranteed minimum funding or find out if a school is in financial difficulty."

How are they funding the CEOs and the other senior leaders high salaries, hotel stays, cars etc if not with money that should be spent within a school?

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00071005.2023.2258191#abstract
This article in the British Journal of Educational Studies argues for a common framework for all schools.

Exactly as predicted, more SEN being brought into mainstream with tiny % uplift in funding due to specialist SEN schools being too expensive

https://www.tes.com/magazine/news/general/send-10000-new-places-mainstream-and-special-schools

I sit on PX Panels and a lot of the kids have SN and just cannot cope in mainstream.
More schools to meet their needs are required not fewer.
No amount of money will allow some of these children to have a decent education in mainstream, not to mention the disruption suffered by their peers from them not being able to cope and disregulating.

It is just such a shame that Labour cannot acknowledge that small private schools were filling the SEND gap for some children, with the focus on wellbeing, extracurricular and small class sizes. Not all SEND is going to be severe, but as a society we can make a big impact on future productivity by plugging gaps on the less severe SEND and educating these children to fulfil their potential in the future. Small private schools were fulfilling this need at a really reasonable cost. They need to admit that and copy the model, not destroy the sector!

Going back to the OP’s original question, as schools’ funding mostly goes on staffing costs, schools will make staff redundant. Teachers will have to deal with more stress, more work and even less support for children with additional needs, because support staff will have been culled. Behaviour in the classroom will go further downhill. Secondary schools will offer fewer subjects. Primary schools in particular will close, or will reduce their PAN (published admission number) so that they can cull classes (ie teachers) and ensure their classes are full to capacity. School buildings will fall into further states of disrepair. Parents will spend even more of their time complaining about the state of their children’s schools and education.

As for breakfast clubs, the Government is paying 60p per child for all of 30 minutes. Children using this provision will probably get water and a bowl of supermarket own-brand cornflakes. In schools that already offered paid-for breakfast clubs, children of better off parents have proven themselves willing to pay to have more than 30 minutes of wraparound care, so schools will either straight away, or in due course, ask them to pay for the extra, which will subsidise the free provision for the last 30 minutes. Schools will find it hard to staff breakfast clubs, breaks and lunchtimes with reliable employees, because term time only jobs for an hour or two at a time at silly times of the day at very low pay are unappealing (they cut the day up, making it harder to find other work to fit around it), but a lot of the support staff who used to cover that work as part of a full school working day will have been made redundant. Schools will therefore constantly be asking teachers to help out with lunchtimes and breakfast clubs due to the absence of anyone else to supervise the children and keep them safe.

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2025/mar/30/councils-england-insolvency-risk-send-costs