Austerity in the classroom

The coalition promises free schools, pupil premiums and more academies, but how will it pay for them? No one seems to know

By Judith Judd

The party's over for education. Labour promised to ringfence school spending. The Conservatives didn’t. On Budget day, George Osborne, the Chancellor, promised with carefully-phrased vagueness to recognise the “particular pressures on education”, but schools are preparing for times that are tougher than any they can remember.

Even Labour recognised that school spending had to come down, for it has been quite a party. Just before the general election, a group of headteachers wrote to a national newspaper about the Labour government’s “unprecedented investment in schools”. Few would quarrel with that. When the Major government left office in 1997, building repairs were billions of pounds in arrears, school staffing had been squeezed and cuts had brought thousands of parents and governors on to the streets.

In the next 13 years, spending on schools at current prices rose from £29 billion to more than £64 billion and spending per pupil almost doubled to more than £6,000. The figures for school buildings are even more dramatic: spending rose tenfold from £700 million to £8 billion last year.

Meanwhile, heads hired more than 40,000 extra teachers and the number of teaching assistants almost trebled to more than 180,000. Some schools now have more teaching assistants and administrative staff than teachers. Teachers have done well in recent pay settlements compared with other public sector workers. The police were furious when the teachers’ present three-year deal was agreed, breaching the Government’s 2 per cent limit. Ministers also backed bigger salaries for heads, convinced that good leadership was the key to improving education. Headteachers of big secondary schools in London now earn more than £100,000.

The scale of George Osborne’s proposed savings is such that, even if universities and Sure Start early years’ programmes take a big hit, schools will have to do some serious cost-cutting. And pay and pensions are the only way to make cuts of any size. More than 80 per cent of schools’ running costs goes on staff salaries. The two-year freeze in salaries from next year will make a difference, but a survey in the Times Educational Supplement suggests that a quarter of heads expect to cut teaching assistant posts, introduced to free teachers from the more mundane classroom tasks.

A smaller number expect to shed teachers. It also suggests that a government that wanted to hold down teachers’ salaries would have heads’ support: three-quarters of primary and secondary heads thought teachers in their schools were “sufficiently well paid“. John Hutton’s pension review will bring changes to the profession’s final salary scheme. If the scheme remains, employees will almost certainly have to pay higher contributions.

How will the coalition pay for its new education policies: the pupil premium, free schools and the creation of more academies? Nobody seems to know. Three days after the Budget, heads who had enquired about academy status for their schools complained that Education Department officials could not tell them how much extra money they would receive if they broke free from local authorities. No wonder. The money top-sliced by councils amounts to between 7 and 10 per cent. In theory, a large secondary school that decides to go it alone as an academy would receive an extra sum of between £300,000 and £600,000. But will it? A cash-strapped department with the Treasury on its back will be watching every penny.

Then there’s the pupil premium promised in the coalition agreement. The Liberal Democrats proposed an extra £2,400 a year for pupils on free school meals (total cost about £2.5 billion a year). But Michael Gove, the Secretary of State for Education, says the size will be decided in the autumn spending review. The agreement says that the existing schools budget should not be raided to fund this. Originally, the money was to come from reduced bureaucracy in the department and scrapping child trust funds. Both have already been raided to reduce the deficit.

Free schools are to the Conservatives what the pupil premium is the Liberal Democrats. When the Government says that the school building programme, Building Schools for the Future, will be “reformed and reprioritised”, it means that some of the money intended to replace and refurbish dilapidated buildings will now go to parents and teachers who want to set up their own schools, though the latter are unlikely to get shiny, new, architect-designed classrooms. Ministers will argue that the money that would have gone into councils’ education budgets will go to these schools but the equation isn’t simple. Free schools will be able to operate even in areas where there are empty places in nearby schools. Councils plan, where possible, to cut down these spare places because spare places cost money.

Plans for a national funding formula for education spending are also on the agenda, a reform often mooted but never delivered. If it happens, every school’s budget will be thrown up in the air and inner cities will probably lose out to more affluent shires.

Headteachers’ unions have asked for more information about how the cuts will affect jobs so that they can plan staffing and avoid redundancies. Full details will come in the autumn spending review but heads are under no illusions about the Government’s promise to protect frontline services. By the end of this Parliament, the number of staff in schools will have shrunk and so will their pensions.

28 June 2010

Judith Judd. Former editor of The Times Educational Supplement,