The widespread collapse in support services feeding into schools since the Conservatives took office has been fully revealed in a Schools Week investigation – exposing government claims that restoring cash to 2010 levels will solve funding woes. Samantha Booth reports …
Gillian Keegan has promised that “parents everywhere can be confident” that schools and teachers have the resources they need after a £2 billion funding boost in the autumn statement.
The education secretary pointed to analysis from the Institute for Fiscal Studies saying the cash “would allow schools to return to at least 2010 levels in real terms – the highest spending year in history – and is what the sector said it needed”.
But a collapse in state services brought on by austerity and worsening child poverty rates as the cost-of-living crisis soars has left schools to pick up the pieces.
James Bowen, the assistant general secretary of the school leaders’ union NAHT, said the government’s funding rhetoric “completely ignores all the additional costs schools are now facing” as they fill the void out of their own dwindling budgets.
