Commenting on Chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s Autumn Statement
announcement, Geoff Barton, General Secretary of the Association
of School and College Leaders, said:
“We are bitterly disappointed that the Autumn Statement contained
barely a mention of education – particularly as the Prime
Minister explicitly said in his speech to the Conservative Party
Conference in October that his main funding priority in every
spending review will be education because it is the closest thing
we have to a silver bullet.
“Our schools are literally falling apart, thousands of children
are being disrupted because of the crumbling concrete crisis, and
large parts of the school estate are riddled with asbestos.
Schools and colleges don’t have enough money to meet the likely
cost of future pay awards at anything like the level which is
needed to address severe and chronic staff shortages, and funding
for special educational needs provision is miles short of what is
needed to support our most vulnerable children and young people.
Yet, none of these problems have been mentioned at all, let alone
made a priority. It is lamentable.
“The Prime Minister said that education is the best economic
policy, the best social policy and the best moral policy. It was
clearly too much to hope that this rhetoric would translate into
reality in the Autumn Statement.”
