Forest Hill School Strike

What follows is based on a letter I sent to all Lewisham Councillors and the three local MPs

I'm writing to update you as there has been a great deal of social media traffic regarding the situation at Forest Hill School (FHS). I know that Steve wrote to you last month but I thought it would be helpful to emphasise some of the same messages that he put across in his letter:

• In line with national legislation that has been in place for decades, it is the responsibility of schools in Lewisham to manage their budgets and spending. It is not Lewisham council's fault that Forest Hill School’s budget was mismanaged. The school has to live within its means and there is no option to bail out the school or write off its deficit.

• The new head teacher and new chair of governors of Forest Hill school are tackling the school’s budget deficit by reducing staff numbers (responsibly, fairly and reasonably) and making efficiency savings.

• We are doing everything within our power to support the new head teacher and new chair of governors to raise standards and bring the school’s budget back onto a secure financial footing by helping them follow best practice in HR and in maintaining their work to improve standards at the school during this period of change.

Unfortunately the NUT is going ahead with its threatened strike action. It is currently scheduled for 21st March, 29th March, 30th March. The school will be aiming to mitigate the impact for students. I'm also pasting in below a message from the FHS website from the Headteacher, Mike Sullivan as well as some FAQs from the school since some of the blogging etc on this subject has been very misleading and alarmist. In these FAQs the 'we' is the head and the governing body of the school. 

Message from the Headteacher of Forest Hill School:

I understand that as a parent or carer you want your child to receive the very best education possible at Forest Hill School and any risk to this will cause you great concern. We want to assure you that securing the highest quality of education for all our students is the single most important priority for the school – particularly as we go through this financially challenging period.

As headteacher, I am confident that the proposed reorganisations will safeguard the quality of provision our students receive. Albeit that our current situation is one that I inherited, I remain fully committed to leading the school through this change, so that it emerges stronger and fitter to face significant short and medium term challenges. I would also like to reassure you that the school and Governing Body is working closely with London Borough of Lewisham to jointly address our financial situation. 

We have kept parents and carers informed as we move through this reorganisation process, to ensure that accurate and appropriate information is communicated. However, there is now information in the public domain, some of which has been unhelpfully and inaccurately shared from confidential consultation documents, that is, understandably, causing concern among pupils and parents. I would like to address these and sincerely hope that you are reassured about the actual situation. If you have questions or require further clarification, I am more than happy for you to get in touch with me.

Forest Hill School FAQs

Will there be staff redundancies?

In any reorganisation designed to cut costs, there will inevitably be staff reductions and this is the case for Forest Hill School. As part of our extensive and meticulous planning we have strived to minimise these as far as we can and to ensure there is no adverse impact of students’ education.

There have been no compulsory redundancies for midday meals supervisors. Duty hours were aligned to the 45 minute lunch break. A number decided not to continue working the reduced hours. Currently the school employs four midday meals supervisors working alongside other school staff to provide supervision for pupils at lunchtime.

The number of teaching assistant posts remains unchanged and their working hours have been increased.

The school administration team was reorganised in November 2016. The number of posts remains at 12, with changes in the roles and responsibilities of some staff.

Will there be a reduced curriculum for students?

No subjects are being cut from the curriculum. We are, however, proposing to remodel the KS4 offer by moving from four to three options and this was already under consideration for reasons other than financial savings. We were considering this following last summer’s exam results and the resulting need to address the particularly poor performance of students in the middle ability range.

Will there be less support for students with English as an additional language (EAL) and students with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND)?

Support for students with EAL and SEN needs will continue to ensure that they can effectively access our high quality curriculum. To ensure support is provided for pupils for whom English is an additional language, there will be dedicated curriculum periods for EAL pupils of different competencies delivered by MFL specialists with support from Higher Level Teaching Assistants. Where appropriate, EAL students will continue to be prepared and entered for the English as a Second Language (ESOL) qualifications.

Will teacher workload increase?

All classroom teachers with no other responsibilities will be timetabled to teach 22 out of 25 lessons per week. This constitutes a loading of 88% which is below the statutory maximum of 90%. We are, of course, exploring changes to our systems which will allow us to reduce teacher workload as far as we can.

Will there be reduced resources for students?

While we are dealing with a significant budget challenge, we can assure you that nothing we do to put the school back on secure financial footing will impact students’ education in terms of textbooks, ICT provision and specialist equipment available. To suggest this is the case has absolutely no basis in fact.

Will extra-curricular activities be affected?

Activities outside the classroom are a key part of our students’ learning. While there will inevitably be some changes, our approach will seek ensure continuation of a balanced, varied and appropriate range of extra-curricular activities reflecting the needs of our students.

Forest Hill School's PFI Contract

Finally, some of you have asked me about the PFI contract which FHS is part of. On the one hand, this is what it is - a contract which the local authority entered into many years ago in order to get the schools rebuilt and some schools find the annual payments a strain. Indeed we have identified the pressures that the annual payments cause for school budgets and have (with the agreement of all schools) introduced a new factor into the school budget formula which caps any school's annual payment to 10% of the school's budget. Non-PFI schools spend about 10% of their budget on facilities management, repairs and maintenance and the other functions which the PFI contractor fulfils. So the PFI contract is not the cause of FHS's budget overspend. The school is more or less full and has not had the problems experienced by schools which are not able to attract full cohorts. 

If you hear other rumours or concerns circulating, do let me know and we will help the school address these in their communication with parents as well as circulating information to you all as is helpful.

#schoolsjustwannahavefunds

Many thanks to everyone who came to Edmund Waller School last night for the Fair Funding For All Schools Campaign meeting. I am sure that everyone would like to thank all those who were involved in making the event happen, especially Cassie Raine. Matt Dykes, Co-Founder of the Campaign, was outstanding in his grasp of the subject, passion for the issue and insight into what would make the campaign successful. For more details of the campaign, how to get involved and what you can do, go to their website here (#schoolsjustwannahavefunds). Of the many good points Matt made I would highlight the following:

• Everyone needs to come together to fight the Tory proposals. That means schools, parents, teachers and their unions, politicians and local Councils. We shouldn’t allow the focus to be taken off the government by fighting each other.

• It is Tory backbenchers that are the power in the land, as a government with a majority of 17 is very weak and vulnerable to the threat of a revolt from their own side. The way to use this weakness as leverage is to constantly remind the government that they fought the 2014 General Election on a manifesto that promised to maintain per pupil funding for education not cut it, which is what their Fair Funding proposals are all about. Assertions that education funding is being protected are false, just as the claims that the NHS is being protected from Austerity is false, as witnessed by the current crisis in A&E departments and rising hospital waiting lists.

I would like to reiterate a point I made last night. It’s true to say that there are differences across the country in per pupil funding. But these are not the result of a desire on the part of previous governments to perpetrate an injustice on certain parts of the country. Rather, it is the result of local democracy. For many, many years Labour politicians fought local and city elections on manifestos that prioritised education and pledged to raise the taxes to fund it. Their local communities backed them at the ballot box. As a result places run by Labour, largely urban areas, invested more in education than their Tory counterparts, largely in rural areas. No wonder that Tory run areas are deliverying some of the worse educational outcomes for children, while London, a broadly Labour city, has seen massive improvement and is now a ‘stand-out’ national performer. So instead of being an exercise in righting the wrongs of inequality in funding for education, ‘Fair Funding’ is about robbing money from communities who voted consistently over the years for more resources for education and the taxes to pay for it, and giving it to places who didn’t.

Thanks again to everyone who came and took part. Be assured that despite debilitating cuts with more to come, Lewisham Council is on your side. The Council is led by elected members who are Lewisham residents and in may cases parents of children who are at or have been to Lewisham schools. Many are school governors. We are all determined to defend our schools and to do all be can to ensure that our children get the best education they can.

Defending Our Schools Against Government Funding Cuts

I and my councillor colleagues are being asked a lot of questions about school budgets at the moment. It's not my favourite part of being a Cabinet Member as I would want our schools to remain among the highest funded in the country as of course it's easier for schools to deliver great outcomes for pupils when they are well funded. But there's been national control of the schools funding regime for many years now and this is set to be taken one step further with a national funding formula. As a result schools up and down the country (but especially in London) are facing a huge financial challenge.

Before I address the new funding regime, I want to say something about the very few schools in Lewisham who have already got big financial problems which they are working their way out of. The most high profile one of these is Forest Hill School (FHS). The school is more or less full of pupils so it doesn't have the gaps in the school roll which have led to financial problems for other schools. The school ended 2015/16 with a budget deficit which the governing body had not predicted. Following that, a new headteacher, new chair of governors and new bursar have uncovered an extremely challenging budget situation which is being addressed by reducing the staff structure across the school, with support from officers at the local authority. Some voices out there are saying that the council's to blame for the school mismanaging its budget. But the financial relationship between schools and the local authority changed 30 years ago. The analogy I like to use is that as the local authority, we paint the lines on the road and give the schools a copy of the Highway Code as well as a few driving lessons - but it's for the governing body and headteacher to drive the car. Could we have spotted FHS's problems a few months earlier? Possibly - and we've improved our systems to learn from what's gone wrong in that school. But the outcome would have been the same - the school has to work within its budget. We've extended the payback period for the deficit to the maximum but we can't write off the school's debt - it wouldn't be legal or financially feasible to do so. We don't want to use our intervention powers as this would start the school on the road to becoming an academy. 

Forest Hill's situation - along with all the schools in Lewisham - will be made far worse by real terms cuts of more than 10% which come through the proposed national funding formula. With London Councils we fought off the first iteration of the proposals which would have left our schools 18% worse off - but a 10% cut will have a serious impact on our schools. Even those who are financially healthy now will feel the pain. Many of our schools are looking at how they can share staff and other resources between them to mitigate the effects since even if the government was forced to scrap the national funding formula, schools would still face almost 8% of real terms cuts because of extra costs such as the Apprenticeship Levy and higher national insurance and pension contributions.

So the issue of future funding for schools is one for us all – headteachers, governing bodies, parents, communities and councillors. It’s vital that we all work collectively to make our voices heard by the government so they know how much we value our schools and so that they are left in no doubt about our concerns here in Lewisham. 

Over years of campaigning I've found that the government listens to parents when most of what local councils say gets ignored. So it's fantastic that local parents' groups such as the Campaign for State Education (CASE) are campaigning and organising events and stalls to mobilise parent power. Heidi Alexander MP and CASE are organising a meeting on Saturday 11th March at The Barn @ The Green Man, 355 Bromley Road, SE6 2RP, which I will be attending. I'll also be attending a meeting organised by local parents on Thursday 16th March from 7.30-9pm at Edmund Waller Primary School. This will be a public forum for parents, teachers and concerned members of the community in Lewisham to raise concerns about the proposed cuts to schools’ budgets and lobby central Government to revise the formula. Vicky Foxcroft MP will be attending. I hope to see you there. 

 

For the national parents' campaign and petition see: http://www.fairfundingforallschools.org/act-now.html. 

To reply to the DfE consultation: https://consult.education.gov.uk/funding-policy-unit/schools-national-funding-formula2/