Every day, headteacher Richard Slade crunches the numbers at the inner-city primary school he leads.
“Can we reduce the number of toilet rolls we’re buying?” he asks. “Do we need so many pencils? Does every subject need its own exercise book?
“Should we stop music lessons, or providing hot meals?”
These are the questions Mr Slade would like to invite the new Secretary of State Gillian Keegan to consider.
“I would love the Department for Education to come in and go through the books,” says the 57-year-old head of Plumcroft, a community primary in South East London.
“Even our sophisticated financial modelling shows the numbers just don’t stack up.”
His school faces a minimum £154,000 deficit this financial year.
