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/