Staff not being replaced, parents being asked for cash and even Gove’s curricular changes having an impact: heads detail funding pressures on their schools

Heads marching in Parliament Square, central London, this morning

To the tourists milling around Parliament Square and the Houses of Parliament on a glorious autumn morning, it may have made for an incongruous sight.

What the group of primary school children, decked out in luminous orange jackets and heading towards Westminster Abbey, made of it - or were told about it, by their teachers - was anyone’s guess.

But the hundreds of neatly-dressed headteachers, gathered in the square with banners and the occasional whistle for a march to Downing Street, seemed to have succeeded in making further inroads into the national consciousness, in raising concerns about the funding of their schools.

Education Uncovered, freed from its normal office habitat of scrutinising documents, data and company accounts, travelled to Westminster this morning to have a word with some of the heads.

Perhaps bravely, I put to them some of the “you’ve never had it so good” arguments still being used by the government. Unsurprisingly, these received short shrift.

What were the details of the funding situations in their schools that brought them here, I asked.

Sarah Hewitt-Clarkson, head of 700-pupil Anderton Park primary school in Birmingham, highlighted straight away the £49m of “real-term” cuts which are reportedly facing schools in the city by 2020.

She said: “Every single one of my pupils is an absolutely fantastic human being. We want to provide them with a first-class, first world education, but we cannot afford to fix our windows or the roof.”

Hewitt-Clarkson said that her pupils’ needs were many and growing, in this school where very few children speak English as a first language – the established pupil population of children of Pakistani heritage had been added to in recent years with more than 100 pupils from Romanian families – but that support resources were very stretched.

Pupil anxiety and mental health problems were also on the rise, she warned.

She said that when members of staff left, they were not being replaced, and that this had been the case for four years now.

She said: “We have got 32 pupils in most classes now. When a teaching assistant leaves, we do not replace them. When someone from our resource team, or our office staff, leaves we do not replace them. Even five years ago, we would simply have advertised for someone new. This has been a massive change in the way we run things.”

Asked about the DfE’s line that schools were receiving more funding than ever before, Hewitt-Clarkson said: “I’m speechless. That may be true [though pupil numbers and costs have risen], but we also know that some chief executives of multi-academy trusts [actually, it appears only one] are on £400k a year.  That was not the case four to five years ago.

“You only need a few of these cases, and that is £1m. There are also free schools which have opened and closed with very few pupils. Money is being wasted in these ways: one of those CEOs’ salaries could be almost half a small primary school’s budget.”

Melvyn Tatters, head of Westbrook primary, run by a single-academy trust in Hounslow, west London, said: “We are struggling to survive. We have had year-on-year cuts in Hounslow.

He said the school’s per-pupil funding had been cut by £50 last year. As a result, it had asked parents to contribute “about £10 per family” to school funds.

“Most parents understand the need, but they also point out that it’s wrong that we have to ask,” he said. He said Hounslow, whose funding formula affected even academies such as his own school, was, like all local authorities, facing serious pressures on its budgets.

He added: “I think the government is going to have to listen to us, because schools are on the brink, and it’s going to affect [pupil] standards and progress.”

I also caught up with Paul Kilbride, head of Old Swinford Hospital school, a boys’ comprehensive, in Stourbridge, west Midlands, as he was chatting to Robin Bevan, head of Southend high school for boys, a grammar school academy.

Bevan, who also made this point on television this morning, told me his school’s pupil numbers had increased from 950 to 1,300 pupils since 2012 – that’s a rise of more than a third – but staff numbers had not increased.

He said: “This drives workload, as class sizes increase by 20, 30,40, even some by up to 50 per cent. Every teacher has more to do.

“I started raising this with my local MP and with the DfE in 2013. Letters and meetings have taken place every year, and yet every year, the funding for my school has gone down.

“There is a point where you have to drop the politeness. Well, actually we still are being polite and reasonable, but we are saying ‘enough is enough’.”

A commenter on social media raised the issue of Bevan’s salary, and this website being this website, I decided to look it up: £155-£160k in 2016-17, including £20-£25,000 in pensions. This is considerably higher than would normally apply to a school of the same size in the maintained sector.

Kilbride said that while the raw amount of money being put into the system was higher than before, so were costs. “Children are coming into secondary school with often greater needs than before. More and more children have diagnoses of complex needs. They need extra support.”

Bevan and Kilbride argreed that the new National Funding Formula, which seeks to equalise some funding disparities between local authority areas, was a “small move in the right direction” in principle but that its “baseline” had been set too low and that measures to ensure that no school lost out too much in the short-term from any changes would limit any positive effects for the worst-funded.

Did the country currently have enough money to increase the schools budget to keep up with costs, the two heads were asked.

Bevan responded: “Every single pound spent on education will come back to you many times over in terms of the benefits of having a highly-educated population.”

Meanwhile, Helen Loughran, head of Freman College, a comprehensive academy in Buntingford, Hertfordshire, said: “For all that the Secretary of State has said that education funding has never been as high, which is true because there are more students, our costs have also massively increased.

“Sixth form funding has been slashed. The contributions we need to make to pensions and national insurance are increasing year-on-year.

“Some schools are going to be looking at– if they are not already – increasing class sizes, reducing support staff, cutting minority subjects. These cuts will affect standards of education.”

She added that changes outside of funding were also having an impact.

She said: “If you look at the changes that [Michael] Gove made to the curriculum, we are already seeing the impact of that on children, with school attendance rates falling for the first time in a long time.

“We no longer have a curriculum that some of our students can access, and we don’t have the funding that will give them the support they need. When you are being asked to deliver a more academic curriculum to mixed ability students, you need to provide that support to some of them. It’s harder now.”

As the heads walked up Whitehall to Downing Street, Education Uncovered left them to it, convinced that this politest of protests was having an impact, as illustrated by the scrum of photographers trying to get the best shot.

A precise head count was, as ever, hard to gauge but the march seemed to stretch at least a 100m or so from Parliament Square, and numbers on the gathering certainly ran into several hundreds. If numbers really were beyond 1,000, that seems a significant minority among England’s 22,000 state schools.

The Department for Education, however, seemed still to be in its bunker, tweeting that “there is more money going into our #schools than ever before and we’re helping schools to manage and make the most of their budgets”.

But school funding broke through as an issue with voters at last year’s general election and you suspect these headteachers are pushing against an open door, in terms of support, with a large section of the public.