The Elizabethan Age ends as it began for schools: with money worries
Dear global education leader,
“Pioneering is hard enough, but with crowded classrooms, cramped quarters and penny-wise administrators, the task of forging a new style of education is more formidable than ever.”
Sound familiar? That was the lament of the Times Educational Supplement the week Queen Elizabeth II took the throne in 1952. And this week, as the Elizabethan Age draws to a close, schools in England find themselves in a similarly precarious financial situation.
There’s a triple threat of financial issues coming down the pipeline. A wage increase of 5 per cent for experienced teachers – a bigger rise than expected, and announced after most schools had set their budgets for the year – means that many budgets are now “not worth paper they’re written on”.
It doesn’t help that in England, the Department for Education takes advice from the independent School Teachers’ Review Body and makes recommendations for pay rises based on that. However, it is the Treasury that decides what money, if any, will be allocated to schools to fund any increase in wage costs. The Treasury declined to fund the extra rise in pay for experienced teachers, and so we are left in the ludicrous position where the same government that recommended the pay rise also refused to pay for it, instead asking leaders to use money out of their existing budgets.
The second threat is the well-documented energy crisis currently occupying a large portion of new prime minister’s Liz Truss ’ inbox. The crisis is worse in the UK than in many other nations owing to the country’s reliance on gas, where supply issues caused in part by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have caused prices to skyrocket. The UK also has the least energy efficient buildings in Europe. An expected rise in October and January led school trust leader Jon Chaloner to tell radio station LBC this week that their bills would triple from ￡1.5m to ￡4.5m. With budgets already stretched, that ￡3m extra was proving crippling. Another head, Vic Goddard , shared how his schools could no longer afford textbooks owing to the anticipated increase in energy prices.
Small relief came in an announcement this week of a six-month energy “guarantee” — with few details provided other than the promise of support for public sector organisations. But, as school leaders have pointed out, this could mean that budgets are busted once that six months ends – leaving schools financially adrift as they head into Easter.
Those two on their own are enough to create serious worries about the future for schools in England. Add in the third issue, inflation (which we covered in a previous memo), and, for independent schools, increased pension costs and the threat of an end to their charitable status, and it’s tough to see how any school can make these numbers add up.
For years, schools have been asked — and sometimes not even asked, but expected — to pick up the pieces where society has fallen short. They provide a safety net for the most vulnerable; young people who may not have access to books, to clothes or even to their own bed. Schools, and everyone who works in them, will always put the needs of their students first. But they cannot do so for free. They cannot make scant amounts of money stretch as far as it needs to go indefinitely. And so difficult decisions will have to be made. And it is the already disadvantaged who will miss out the most, at a time when learning loss caused by the pandemic has led to a widening gap between the haves and the have nots.
Teachers and school leaders want to help. They have the will. They just need the policy and the cash to back it. The alternative, of children having no safety net to catch them before they fall, is something that we as a civilised society simply cannot allow to happen.
Keep learning,