On Friday 27 September, the prime minister, Boris Johnson, by then comfortably settled into Downing Street and just five weeks away from the Brexit deadline, would, if he walked out of his front door, find himself faced with an unusual group of protesters.
More than 5,000 headteachers from across England are promising to walk out of their schools to take part in a mass march on Westminster to highlight once again the shortfall in education funding that has been making headlines for months if not years. It is their second such protest and there will be more.
Such are the difficulties faced by schools that teachers are having to close at lunchtime on Fridays because they can’t afford to teach a full week, teaching jobs and teaching assistant roles are being cut to save money, parents are being asked to carry out maintenance work, subjects are being cut and headteachers have turned their begging bowls to parents who are being asked to make regular donations to keep their school afloat.
Johnson, famously educated at Eton college and Oxford University, has been quick to flag up his concerns about education, promising to reverse the cuts that have blighted England’s schools in recent years with an additional £4.6bn per annum by 2022/23. Opinion varies on how much of an impact his pledges will make, given the scale and deep-seated nature of the crisis schools in England are facing and the lack of detail in the offer.
“This is the first time the government has officially recognised what school leaders have been saying for years,” said Paul Whiteman, general secretary of school leaders union NAHT. “That school funding has been cut in real terms, while at the same time schools have been faced with rapidly rising costs.
“But schools cannot budget based on warm words alone. There is confusion over what is actually being promised and when. What schools need is a clear and concrete funding plan to be officially announced – and they need it now.”
Kevin Courtney, joint general secretary of the National Education Union (NEU), is more dismissive. “Our message to Boris Johnson is that, if he is serious about a domestic agenda which includes education as his top priority, we need more than just promises on the side of a bus. We need real money for real pupils in real schools.”
The NEU together with the NAHT, the Association of School and College Leaders and the f40 group of lowest-funded local authorities have said an additional £12.6bn is needed by 2022/23 to reverse cuts and provide “a standard of education that society expects”. Johnson’s offer, which fails to address the particularly acute problems in special educational needs and post-16 funding, falls short by quite a margin.
The background to the budget crisis in schools, according to the Institute for Financial Studies (IFS), is an 8% real terms cut in funding between 2009/10 and 2017/18. A 2019 report by the Education Policy Institute (EPI) found that almost one in three (30%) local authority maintained secondary schools were in deficit in 2017/18 – up from just 8% in 2014. At the same time, while pupil numbers have gone up, teacher recruitment and retention has struggled to keep pace. An earlier EPI report found just 60% of teachers are still working in state-funded schools five years after starting.
Johnson’s education pledges began with a blunder. During the leadership campaign he promised to raise minimum per pupil funding to £5,000 a year in secondary schools and £4,000 in primaries. His aim was to appease Tory MPs who have made life uncomfortable for the government, repeatedly railing against higher funding in (deprived) London at the expense of (less disadvantaged) schools in their constituencies.
SchoolsWeek calculated that Johnson’s big offer would in fact amount to a tiny sum – around £50m in extra funding or a 0.1% increase in overall school spending. “They thought it was a large figure and it turned out to be small,” said Jonathan Simons, who was head of education in the prime minister’s strategy unit when Gordon Brown was prime minister and is now director of education at Public First policy consultancy. “Things are done at speed. You don’t have a huge amount of specialists around. They overestimated the cost of it.”
Johnson’s subsequent commitment to reverse the cuts in per pupil spending and return them to 2015 levels was a much more substantial offer. “There’s a political driver for this,” said Simons. “Education is rising up the political agenda – in polling we know it is one of the top three or four issues for the public. We know in 2017 that a lot of people switched their vote from Conservative to Labour on the issue of schools funding.”
The Tories, he says, are obsessed, with winning back the 18 to 24-year-old cohort, and giving more money to schools is part of that.
Luke Sibieta, an IFS fellow who has extensively researched education spending, agrees the additional £4.6bn per annum is a significant increase in education funding, and could make a real difference to school budgets and to classrooms. How much of an impact it has depends when the money will be made available and what it will have to cover.
“The £4.6bn is almost set in stone now, particularly now he has mentioned it in the House of Commons. That will be a significant boost to school funding, enough to reverse the 8% cuts since 2010. The big question is when that will occur. Schools will be keen to receive it soon, given the pressures they are facing at the moment. The other big question mark is what it will include.”
If it has to cover, for example, increases in employer pension contributions, which will cost £1.5bn a year alone, it will disappear rapidly, said Sibieta. There’s also the recent 2.75% pay rise for teachers to fund from September – the government has so far only agreed to fund 0.75%, the remainder will have to be found by schools.
Sibieta said the devil will be in the detail of the Johnson offer, but he agrees with Whiteman that the £4.6bn marks a significant shift by the Conservatives who for years batted off headteachers’ cries for help, insisting record sums were going into schools. “They are acknowledging there have been big cuts in school budgets – that’s a big change in itself.”
Jules White, headteacher at Tanbridge House School, Horsham, West Sussex and organiser of September’s march on Downing Street, has listened carefully to what Johnson has to offer and says there are currently no plans to call off the protest.
“Input of £4.6bn will be welcome but that will only take us back to where we were in 2010,” he said, speaking from a blustery clifftop in Jersey on the second day of his summer holiday. “The temptation for a short-term fix to quieten heads and parents down will not work.
“We are crying out for long investment – not only in financial terms but in meaningful integrated decision making too. The question is, will Mr Johnson seize the moment and dare to be different, or tread the same path that has let down our schools and pupils for so long and so badly?”
Education in numbers
£4.6bn – the amount Boris Johnson has pledged to increase school funding by per annum by 2022/23;
£12.6bn – the figure teaching unions and school leaders say is required to reverse cuts and provide the education society expects;
8% – the real-terms cut in school spending per pupil between 2009/10 and 2017/18.
