The NAHT’s New General Secretary, Paul Whiteman, Begs To Disagree With The Government’s Talk On Funding
“Schools are already cutting back on the number of subjects they offer at GCSE and A Level”
At the moment, schools don’t have enough money. It’s as simple as that.
According to the schoolcuts.org.uk website that uses government and independent data to make its calculations, 93 per cent of schools will face per pupil cuts to their budgets by 2019/20, and on average, there will be £436 less funding for every secondary school pupil.
It’s not news to us: NAHT has been saying that school budgets have been at breaking point for over two years, and surveying our members, seven out of ten school leaders are saying that their budgets will be unsustainable by the 2019 academic year.
The year Britain is supposed to leave the European Union, with all the uncertainty that comes with it, is the moment seven out of ten schools will cease to be able to balance their books. That’s not sensible public spending, that’s reckless.
And yet, the government continues to make a pseudo-moral argument that it would be wrong to increase spending on crucial public services like schools because the bill for that spending would end up being paid by future generations.
Gambling with their futures
There is a moral argument surrounding school funding, but I believe it’s different from the one the government is making.
Our children have just one chance at their education. Without investment now, we are taking a terrible gamble with their futures. Without proper funding for schools, how can we look them in the eye years from now and say that we did everything we could to prepare them for the challenges of 21st Century life?
We’ll have given them a pre-Brexit education for a post-Brexit world. We’ll have short-changed them to an unforgivable extent.
The lack of investment in secondary education will have a huge impact on the range of subjects pupils can study. Schools are already cutting back on the number of subjects they offer at GCSE and A Level. A lack of funding is narrowing the opportunities that our young people will get.
This is another way that we will be under-preparing our young people for the future. They won’t have the opportunities that recent previous generations have had. That’s a reality that’s completely at odds with the government’s stated aim to build a fairer society.
An election issue
The amount we spend on schools and young people became a key General Election issue this year, and more than 800,000 people changed their vote on Polling Day because they were concerned about the government’s approach to funding schools.
The Prime Minister and The Chancellor found themselves out of step with public opinion.
At a huge rally in Westminster in July, parents and school staff showed that they weren’t satisfied with the status quo and more money needed to be found.
A day or so later, the government announced that £1.3billion pounds had been cobbled together from within the Department for Education’s current budget and that this money would be spent on schools from April 2018. Of course that’s a step in the right direction; but there’s no extra money from the Treasury.
Whilst we welcome any additional funding for schools, what’s on offer is well below the £2 billion a year extra that schools need to address real terms cuts. It’s clear that the Department for Education has listened to our concerns, and is doing its bit to address the funding gap. However, the Treasury is not backing this up with new, additional funding.
From now until the Budget in the Autumn, NAHT will continue to press the Treasury to open their coffers, too. Their reluctance will undermine any plans the government has to make a fairer society.
In the end, the moral argument about not short-changing future generations must defeat the ideological reluctance to spend more on public services.
School funding is increasing by a modest amount, but it is not enough, at a time when the demand on schools has never been higher. We still believe that schools need at least an extra £2billion per year.
Paul Whiteman is general secretary of the NAHT.
