As writer in residence at an inner London primary school, I usually find the start of a new academic year puts a spring in my step. However, I recently became a governor of the federation my school works with – and the insight this has afforded me into education finances is deeply sobering.
This is the year the new national funding formula will bite. Under this redistribution of the schools budget the losers – including my federation – face cuts into the hundreds of thousands of pounds, on top of already painful real-terms losses due to funding freezes and rising wage bills. Even those who stand to gain from the new formula are suffering, as their budgets fail to keep up with costs.
I know many see the new formula as a necessary corrective, and think city schools and their governors should stop complaining. I have great sympathy for those outside London who are working for a better deal. And it’s true that London boroughs top the league table for spending on education. But they need to. London teachers’ salaries are higher than elsewhere – they have to be for teachers to afford to live here – and up to 80% of a primary school’s budget goes on wages.
But beyond salaries, this government’s approach to school funding is deeply unfair on the children I teach, and others like them in low-wage families across the country. “Inner London school” used to be a byword for under-attainment. Low household income and low levels of literacy and numeracy have gone hand in hand for generations, and London boroughs tasked their schools with mitigating this. They were to provide their pupils with improved life-chances – and it was working.
I work in classes where 80-90% of the children are on free school meals, and see daily that income doesn’t need to be a barrier to attainment. When I started at our school, it was failing, with a pass rate of 31%. Five years on, our children outperform national averages (88% for maths SATs this summer; 79% for grammar). I applaud the government’s high standards; I applaud our children even more for rising to them. But without relatively small classes, targeted group interventions, additional training for staff, and specialist teachers, results like ours would not be achievable. Without this grounding, too many of our pupils would struggle to do even moderately well at secondary school. As it is, children we have taught go on to be prefects, and to be in the top sets; one has been awarded a bursary to help her secure a place at university.
My school faces a future without teaching assistants; the deputy heads who coordinated and delivered additional support will have to go back into class full-time to reduce staffing costs; and classes will merge for the same reason. The children who can least afford this – who have special educational needs, whose home language is not English, whose parents are functionally illiterate – will be the first to suffer.
The new funding formula has pitted school against school, region against region, when we should be confronting our common foe: austerity. Poverty levels have been rising all the while. Children at the sharp end of austerity, wherever they live, need a properly funded education to escape this. The government needs to step up.
During the general election campaign, Conservative politicians routinely spat out the empty phrase “spending on schools is at record levels”. It isn’t. We have record numbers of children, but the per-pupil spend is falling, and this is the only measure that counts. This is not an idle claim: the Institute for Fiscal Studies supports it – and it is affecting all schools, whether inner city, coastal or rural.
I’m placing all my hopes on the prospect that, now MPs of all parties are returning from their summer recess, enough of their constituents will be kicking up a fuss about this. And that means you. We must urge the Treasury to listen to reason, and the teaching unions to fight this on a unified and national basis.
There are too many schools across the country that could, and would, do more for their pupils, but can’t afford to. In the coming years, those pupils will make up a huge part of Britain’s workforce. You think we have a skills deficit now? Just wait. With these cuts we risk doing the entire country, as well as significant numbers of young people, a major disservice. Unless spending increases, improved educational outcomes will remain the stuff of fantasy.
• Rachel Seiffert is a school governor and novelist. Her latest book is A Boy in Winter
