Schools Funding Crisis - meeting for Merton Parents

[TheHouseofMirth]

If you have school-age children or little ones who will be starting school in the next year or so, you may be interested in a meeting which a local mum is organising at Hollymount School, Cambridge Road, SW20 on 7th June at 7pm. Representatives from Merton council and local schools will discuss the extent of the funding crisis in schools and how it will affect our children. Parents will also have the chance to ask questions of the experts.

If you're not already aware, you can see how much money your child's school is likely to lose in the next 5 years here

Hi TheHouseofMirth, thanks for posting up the info. If you happen to attend the meeting it would be fantastic if you could report back to us .

Certainly will though it will be great if as many parents as possible can attend!

A very interesting and pretty sobering meeting. Speakers were headteachers from Hollymount and Coombe Boys, a primary school governor, the leader of Merton Council and the Lib Dem parliamentary candidate.

Basically the figures shown on the School Cuts website are correct, so for example my son's primary school will lose £147,000 from its budget over the next couple of years and many other Merton schools will be similarly affected.

The Hollymount head spoke about how this comes on top of several years of effective budget cuts as their bills for pensions and national insurance have gone up and new curriculums have been introduced but no additional funds have been forthcoming. Because of that they have already cut their budgets to the bone and the new funding formula will now force them to sack teaching assistants to make ends meet.

The secondary head also talked about the inability to recruit and retain enough teachers, enlarged class sizes, the possibility of some secondaries either shortening the school week or school day and also losing subjects like music altogether.

The reaction from parents was very strong and there are many things which we can do to put pressure on the government to put adequate funds into education. The mum who organised the meeting has set up this Facebook page for more information about the campaign and how parents can get involved

Hi HouseofMirth

Thank you so much for reporting back to us - it does indeed make for a sobering read.

I am aware of fallout of the cutbacks already starting to 'kick in' - at DD's school the SLT has already talked about 'natural wastage' as a way of dealing with reducing staff numbers.

Kate