Head who said she cleaned the toilets earns between £120-130,000 a year. The school has £1,285,000 in unrestricted reserves.

[BubblesBuddy]

Why is she cleaning the toilets and vacuuming the school when it has substantial reserves and she earns a good whack? Senior Deputy earns £80-90,000. They appear to have money and their accountants say the school is fiscally sound. Why did she say she had to clean the school to save money? It appears to be untrue and there is money to pay for an additional cleaner! A few £ off her salary would cover it!

Our HT serves in the canteen. She says it is an excellent way of getting to see lots of children, have a (brief) conversation with everyone and to be seen to be doing something positive (a lot of a HT's role is invisible to primary-aged children).
She would never blame it on funding, even if (as I suspect) there may be a bit of truth in it.

Not sure if the headteacher's salary is accurate but headteachers shouldn't pay cleaning staff out of their salary surely ? Or should headteachers' salaries be reduced to pay for cleaning staff? Or (best imo) the government should fund education properly?

Education secretary Damian Hinds should meet head teachers to discuss school funding instead of saying ( twice) that he is too busy!

Wow those are huge salaries. Im v aware education is squeezed at the moment and the children are missing out for it...

But if academies have so many at the top on high salaries surely that affects the budget hugely. You could pay them less, have an extra teacher and a cleaner and still pay a decent salary to the senior staff.

Its certainly noticed in our MAT.

Yes the creation of academies was a shit idea for school funding. Same as free schools. Let’s set up multiple schools in leafy areas and none in the poor areas so the schools there are stretched to the limit and there are empty places in schools in posh areas.... such a poor allocation of resources. Paying multi academy heads mega bucks is also a bad idea and poor resource allocation. Was this a Gove idea or someone before him??

Yep exactly - and losing central lea resources, Sen provision etc means it all comes out of the budget but isnt fair for poorer areas.

It was a Lord Adonis idea. Labour. This schools accounts are freely available. They show the salary bands in £ earned for SLT. She was one of the Heads who complained about lack of funding for her school and said she was cleaning to eek out funds. It’s very leafy and the school has been named by the media and her picture published.

I don’t really think, in general terms, Heads should pay cleaners out of their earnings, (my suggestion was tongue in cheek) but remuneration committees must consider the overall effects of salary awards. They have, I guess, as they are not short of money at all. Parent donations are stellar too. So why did she lie about her school’s financial position? They can easily afford a cleaner!

Lord Adonis admits it was a mistake not to put a cap on MAT CEO pay.

Have you got a link?

The figures quoted are real, they come from the audited accounts of the school through to September 2018.
Some other pertinent figures are that in 2017 they had an average of 76 teacher but 83 in 2018, 49 TAs rising to 58 in 2018 and 7 senior management becoming 9 in 2018.
In terms of funding, total income in 2018 was £7,692,000 but expenditure was £7,823,000 or a £131,000 deficit.
There might well be good reasons behind the increases in staffing and running a deficit budget but then trying to talk about cleaning toilets to save money is just ill-advised. Did the Principal not think that nobody would look at the accounts, including the DfE. They are not helping with this kind of comment to convince the DfE that schools are facing a funding crunch.

The compare schools government website says the school has 11 TAs - where are you getting 58 from? That would be an extraordinary number of TAs!

That is what is in the annual report but i think it is everybody other than teachers and senior management, so would include cleaners, catering staff etc .

This shameless lying can only be to further a political agenda. I wonder will we see the big news channels picking up this story or are they also part of the 'blob'?

According to note 2 of the accounts here
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The unrestricted reserve is 12% of the annual grant
which seems prudent to me

Having a reserve is an absolute necessity as the school needs sufficient cash flow reserves to allow for spending levels between one tranche of income coming from the ESFA to the next. It is not a good idea to have insufficient funding to be able to pay your staff.
As such the absolute minimum needed is around 8.5%, and I would agree that 12% seems a prudent level to have.

She's obviously not enjoying the work;
www.tolworthgirlsschool.co.uk/Early-Morning-Cleaners---Term-time-2-Weeks-Summer-work?returnUrl=/Vacancies-vacancies

Also from the link:
The Academy has seen huge investment over the last few years and we have now opened two new buildings and have refurbished many areas in school.

Nice errant apostrophe in that advert. 'two week's over the summer holidays'.

£131k deficit is not good then, is it? There clearly are problems.

£11 million development completed in September 2018;
lytle-associates.com/projects/tolworth-girls-school/

Free breakfast for all employees seems a bit extravagant if you have to clean the toilets yourself;
www.tolworthgirlsschool.co.uk/StaffWellbeing-Benefits

To clear the deficit would knock the reserves a bit. There are associated revenue costs with opening a new building and this is possibly the deficit. The annual report gives no indication of any financial concern at all. The bottom line is that this school has not got major financial issues that means it cannot afford cleaners. It was very foolish to suggest that this is the case.

Financial accounts are a snap shot based on one date- I can’t get link to work but would guess they’re a good 6 months plus out of date. What you need to check for viability is a current cash flow forecast.

Schools that are not yet in deficit will, in a great many cases, be in severe deficit within the next three years unless changes are made to school funding. Maintained schools are not allowed to run deficit budgets... Therefore, unless the funding situation changes, then you could accuse the government of fiddling while Rome burned. Only complete idiots (or this Government - same difference, really) would wait until it was too late to do anything to prevent the crisis.

And saying a state school is well enough funded because it relies on "stellar" parental donations is tbf a f*cking ridiculous argument.

I wonder if the free breakfasts cost as much as a cleaner? Frankly, teachers should be able to eat breakfast at home - if they are having breakfast at school and relying on the occupational health benefits, they all sound overworked... which would be why there is a teacher recruitment crisis.

Parental contributions vary enormously from school to school. This school has a huge income from parents. It is all part of the financial picture that tends to suggest this is not a school that is really struggling and cannot afford cleaners. It can. Paying cleaners is a tiny amount of the budget. Saying you have financial worries when you don’t takes away the real and understands me concern for schools that do and have very low parental donations.

Claiming a school is OK because of parental donations is claiming the state does not have a responsibility to fund state schools properly, because parents can make up the shortfall... Besides, the school has just had major refurbishments. Parents might be willing to contribute to that, because they perceive it to be outside the norm and building a lasting legacy, so worth having more money spent on than would be possible without their help, but who says they will feel obliged to keep contributing at those levels every year to pay for a cleaner?
Frankly, BubblesBuddy, just what do you think you are trying to argue here? That wealthy parents should be obliged to pay school fees for state school places?