DfE says sort school budgets by cracking down on colour printing

[noblegiraffe]

...among other suggestions. I’m sure this will have a massive impact.

They are coming for your worksheets.

In my school each member of staff has a photocopying budget per month and when it’s gone, it’s gone, so I’m not splashing out on colour printing anyway. What do your schools do?

schoolsweek.co.uk/crack-down-on-staff-who-do-too-much-colour-printing-says-new-dfe-guidance/

We haven’t done colour printing in two years. Still a struggling school budget-wise. Any other cracking ideas DFE!?!!

It's one of the things that drives me mad about the kids' school to be honest (I'm a governor there - I know how grim the budget is)... every challenge activity each day for Maths across the school has a blue border around it (use a dotted border line or something FFS and save the blue toner cartridge) and every single lesson has coloured layered targets printed at the top or stuck in (again don't get me started on the waste of time this takes for highly qualified fantastic teachers and I've been known to tell them to give them here - I'll glue 'em in and go do something more constructive with their time)... and lesson plans, SEN provision maps, parent meeting minutes... all have to use the nice school colour for headings - which is an utter waste of coloured ink again just to make documents look a bit prettier.

I don't begrudge using coloured printing for stuff that it's needed for - but just to make the admin paperwork look a bit prettier for Ofsted it does piss me off.

Mind you I'm a product of the educational era when you weren't allowed to write on worksheets and still occasionally struck gold and got banda ones you could sniff gleefully.

non branded colour ink cartridges are cheap on amazon and are just as good as the ridiculously expensive Canon, Epsom ones etc. They should join Ink Squid or similar.

BackforGood, and after turning out 60 bandas in a tiny room, you’d be stoned for the next hour...

Our school banned ordering from Amazon.

On a side note, schools do pass the cost of this fairly shamelessly on to parents. I discovered DS2 merrily prinitng a full colour 72 page GCSE revsion booklet yesterday!

In fairness, most of us do provide these electronic revision guides for free to the students and don’t specifically tell them to print it out but some pupils will regardless, even when it can be viewed electronically instead. I’d be surprised if your DS was told he had to print off that 72 page booklet!

I print everything at home.

How stupid, banning ordering from amazon, to protect some lucrative account with the governor's husbands overpriced stationery supplies outfit no doubt. You can order from the companies that sell unbranded cartridges direct as well though. Inks Direct is another one. If you buy in bulk they can be a tenth of the price.

Anyone that buys branded ink cartridges is an absolute fool and a mug. I am self employed and print 100s of pages a month - on cheap paper from tesco, 2 quid a pack and with cheap compatible colour cartridges from Amazon. I print the many 70 page pdf revision booklets the kids get for gcse as well as its actually very hard to revise from a screen and difficult to annotate them.

Lord Agnew is a complete embarrassment and frankly should have been pensioned off long ago. His complete ignorance and stupidity is causing real, lasting damage.

blissx, there are questions and activities to do on said 72 pages. Could be done electronically but even most children still don't like working that way. Obvioulsy, he could have just printed off key pages...

Our printer at home is definitely much slower and more expensive.
My school does do such stupid copying, though : and I don't think the fault lies with classroom teachers. Some of our SLT are obsessed with unnecessary 50 page booklets for everything they do , often using clour and certainly printed on rainbow colours. Everyone bins them! The endless data schools produce is colour coded, too. I did read somewhere how much an average Ofsted inspection costs once.

If we banned class teachers from colour printing at my school, the saving would be minuscule (and would impact teaching and learning in some subjects) compared with the saving they could make on SLT and various consultancy payments!

I am a governor at the school where I work. This means I see the budget and can see exactly how much our printer costs are. All printing is now sent to the colour copier rather than a dedicated printer. We would have to cease all printing / copying for several years in order to recoup the salary of even one of the several support staff who had to be let go, due to budget constraints last year.
Making children print our revision etc at home sounds great, unless, like us, you have a sizeable number who don't have access to internet or computers at home.

As someone else said, the cost of books is restrictive - we need one particular book in school to complete a series. That one book can only be purchased in a set along with five others in the series. We don't need the other books, do that one book would effectively cost is around £50. We use six copies at a time, so £300 to get what we need. Far cheaper to borrow a copy from a friend in another school and run off a couple of colour copies which can be kept and used again.

Typical government, cut budgets to the bone and then blame schools. Maybe they could vote us a 3% increase in budgets, and take a cut to their salaries .

Well said!

Was it Nick Gibb who recently bemoaned the worksheet culture and death of the textbook while paying absolutely no heed to the exorbitant cost of textbooks?

Oh yes, Armchair Traveller. -I used to love that smell 😊

BackforGood, and after turning out 60 bandas in a tiny room, you’d be stoned for the next hour...grin

So that explains my biology lessons

Was it Nick Gibb who recently bemoaned the worksheet culture and death of the textbook

Yes, and that was caused by Ofsted! I specifically had an Ofsted consultant tell me that if I made frequent use of textbooks I should re-evaluate my practice!

And of course the changes to GCSE and A-level were so rushed and badly thought out that the new textbooks for them are shit and not worth the money anyway.

Obvioulsy, he could have just printed off key pages...

And ironically, because ICT has been scrapped to make way for Computer Science, where they would have been taught how to print in various ways, young people just click the print button these days without thinking!

Actually I lie, it wasn’t just caused by Ofsted, teacher training providers seem to be very anti-textbook. I spent ages last year with a trainee convincing them that textbooks weren’t the work of the devil but actually a useful collection of differentiated exercises.

Where do we see things going in education though, it’s such a mess?!

My school is being staffed by a mixture of NQTs and then HTLAs doing jobshares with elderly (like me!) teachers who are too expensive to have full time!

We have nothing-teachers buy their own paper, pencils and glue sticks, buy their own Twinkl and Phonics Play subscriptions, even boxes of tissues for the kids. The roof leaks, the trays are broken, the lights flicker, the toilets groan, the sinks smell, the carpets are threadbare and the reading books are held together with sellotape. We ask can’t get people to staff the kitchen as nobody wants to work only 10 hours a week any more as they need more to get tax credits-the SLT are often to be found wiping tables and serving dinners.

It’s so depressing, and to then be told all we need to do is do less glossy photocopying and schools will be fine, is just insulting.

Has a spokesperson for the DfE said, ‘there’s never been a better time to be a teacher’ recently...?

Bring back Risographs!
I photocopy a shit ton in year 6. All black and white. I hate it but i have to expose them to the sats questions.
I wish we had textbooks again. Way back when I started they were so useful. Even now just to have questions there would save me hours, and many trees. I try to use as many questions on the iwb as possible, but it's a job to get them to copy/read accurately from a distance (35 in my room), and it's not ideal for students with sight/glare issues.
I don't think i've copied anything in colour for 5 years! Our display photocopies in colour are strictly controlled from THE OFFICE. None shall pass.