Is anyone else worried about school funding cuts?

[nong45]

Our secondary school is apparently losing £650 per pupil next year which means 15 teachers leaving. It seems like the core subjects are being protected as much as possible but there aren't enough subject teachers for things like art, drama and product design. There is now no music teacher at all and extra-curricular activities are sparse. Supply teachers and non-subject teachers fill in a lot. I don't remember any of this being a problem when I was at school 30 years ago. I'm worried about lack of choice for GCSE and quality of teaching if the good teachers are now just going to be spread too thinly.

I know there's a lot of ongoing protest about this from the teaching profession and national parent groups which I'm intending to add my voice to. But I'm at a loss as to what I can practically do to make sure my own kids get a decent and rounded education apart from scraping some money together for private tuition when they do their GCSEs. The government seem to be intent on ignoring the problems they are causing now and storing up for the future.

Don't vote Conservative would be the first thing!

That's a given!

Pretty much what they said.

It's scary. I remember money being tight when I went to secondary school for things like sharing text books between 3 and they were very old etc, but we had a full compliment of subjects with teachers who'd studied that subject for their degree.

I remember money being tight 30 years ago - not a coincidence that the Tories were in Government then too. Our school are loosing about 17 teachers. We have lost the language assistants already.....

The general consensus is the Tories will be re-elected. If that's the case it's only going to get worse. Education, NHS, social care, the list is endless, all suffering, it all seems so hopeless. Then chuck in the Brexit bill. FFS.

This is the issue the election should be being fought on, not bloody brexit. My Dd is 11 & I want to know why it's ok for this government to throw away her education like this.dds school will be losing close to £700k. it is a total disgrace

It's not just funding, everything is chaos at the moment. Even if schools were properly funded, they can't hire qualified teachers to teach core subjects because 1 in 10 teachers quit last year, the government persistently fails to meet its recruitment targets and it wastes an insane amount of money on incentive schemes. You can currently earn £30k training to be a physics teacher, or £25k to be a maths teacher. At the end of the training year, there is no requirement to actually become a teacher. It's insane. Trainees are taking the money and then running, because becoming a teacher would actually mean a pay drop from the training year.

On top of that, the rushed through entire curriculum reform from primary to post-16 courtesy of Gove has been a complete and total shambles. The poor kids are being totally screwed over, primary, secondary and sixth form.

It's utterly chaotic. I look back wistfully to a year ago when the fuck-up that were the new SATS tests were shambolically introduced, the academy and free school agenda had caused several years of damage and wish that was all we had to worry about now.

My secondary education during the '80s was seriously shit. No teachers for some subjects, other subjects where someone would come in and say 'copy out page 20' then leave, and that was our 'lesson'. No music or drama and little art past third year (as it was then), and I feel utterly depressed that my dc will endure a similar fate under another Tory government.

I honestly don't remember having the teaching issues at school my dc have now. In the 80s I always had proper subject teachers, not many supply teachers at all, not a particularly good curriculum but decent enough lessons on the whole and I came out of it all relatively ok. Our school was threatened with closure at one point though but the community went nuts and the council changed their mind and picked on somewhere smaller. My dc school now hasn't got the places to cope with demand, the teaching space or the money.

DD's school has been underfunded for years. They have already cut the curriculum, lost the learning support unit, have very poor SENCO provision and have increasing class sizes.

It is the fourth most underfunded secondary school in the country and the SLT and parents have been backing a campaign to achieve a fairer funding formula.

I find it shocking that the government thinks it is OK to underfund education.