Responding to the government’s press release on school funding,
Geoff Barton, General Secretary of the Association of School and
College Leaders, said:
“It is important to understand that the £2 billion of additional
funding, that was previously announced in the Autumn Statement,
follows a decade of real-terms cuts to school funding and rising
costs which have left budgets teetering on the brink of disaster.
The additional money will not be sufficient to cover increased
costs in many schools and it is inevitable that there will need
to be further cuts.
“The government talks about how this funding will benefit a
typical school, but there is no such thing as a typical school.
Schools come in many different shapes and sizes and many of them
are in absolutely desperate situation financially because the
system has been starved of the money it needs. School leaders are
at their wits’ end of where they can make further cuts while
maintaining a level of provision that children need and parents
expect.
“The Department for Education increasingly seems as though it is
inhabiting an alternate reality utterly divorced from what is
actually happening in the system it is meant to oversee. There is
a minor concession in this package over the removal of a
requirement for schools to be Ofsted rated good or outstanding in
order to be eligible for additional funding to help manage
a significant decline in pupil numbers. But the reason that
this is such a critical issue in the first place is because the
level of per pupil funding is so low, particularly in primary
schools which are facing this demographic bombshell. Some small
primary schools are barely financially sustainable as it is and
any loss in pupil numbers is virtually impossible to absorb.”
