Success of School Cuts publicity drive –despite Labour’s general election defeat –shows the value of campaigning

Are there any positives, in terms of the future outlook for schools, to cling to for those who backed the losing parties in last week’s general election result?

Many are likely to be desperate for some sense of optimism, given that there is evidence that the Conservatives were only the third choice of teachers in this election, while age-group voter data carries at least a strong hint that the party was not the most popular among the parents of children currently at school. All this, in a national poll billed as the most important in a generation.

Meanwhile, further data, put out by the National Education Union in advance of the election and backed by statistics from the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), shows that the Conservative spending plans for schools are substantially less generous than what would have been implemented under Labour or Liberal Democrat commitments.

So…what is the upside?

Well, my take is that even the Conservative spending projections are much more generous than was suggested two years ago by the party under Theresa May, and that there is at least reason to hypothesise that the “School Cuts” campaign has played a healthy part in that.

So: the financial outlook for schools is still far from great. But it appears – at least based on what we know now in terms of commitments given by…haha…Boris Johnson – to be better than it was before the School Cuts campaign.

Looking back to 2017

The School Cuts website, of course, has allowed people to work out the impact of political spending plans on individual schools. It has been backed with powerful public campaigning.

It appears to have had an impact on the 2017 election result. It may well have played a part in changing the direction of spending proposals subsequently.

In 2017 I had asked, on twitter, about the effect of this on the previous day’s election result. Responses included the following from Dr Becky Allen, the well-known education academic: “It’s been huge, and the individual heads have played their part alongside a brilliant website.”

Before that election, the IFS predicted that, under the Conservative plans under Theresa May, spending on schools would fall in real terms per pupil by 2.8 per cent between 2017-18 and 2021-22.

Yet it turned out that these classroom cutbacks were a clear vote-loser, with even Nick Timothy, Mrs May’s former joint chief of staff, admitting after the election result that many people “are tired of austerity”.

Spending pledges this year

Fast forward two years, and already during his 2019 campaign to be Tory leader Johnson was pledging £4.6 billion more per year to schools by 2022-23. This appears to have been topped by his much-discussed “£14 billion extra” promise, over the same period, offered within weeks of becoming Prime Minister.

Promises from Mr “die in a ditch” Johnson clearly need treating super-sceptically. Specifically, this seemingly huge figure was a product of effective double-counting: rolling up the increases in budgets over successive years to boost the headline number.

But strip away the spin, and even this Conservative promise amounted to what the IFS has described as an increase of £4.3 billion annually, or 7.4 per cent in real terms spending per pupil over the three years of 2019-20 to 2022-23.

The other parties were promising larger gains, of course. Under the Liberal Democrats, the comparable real terms rise would have been 8.5 per cent over the period, while, under Labour, the gain would have been a hefty 14.6 per cent, according to the IFS.

To highlight these figures is not to suggest, of course, that English schools would in any scenario have suddenly looked staggeringly well-resourced. For these increases come after sustained drops in real per-pupil funding since 2010.

Indeed, the School Cuts website has predicted that the Conservative promise still stands to leave schools with £2 billion less spending power in 2020-21 than they had in 2015-16, with no money having been committed for 2023-24 and beyond.

Yet consider, again, how these spending forecasts have changed: the IFS predicting a 2.8 per cent real terms cut in school spending over the period 2017-18 to 2021-22 under the Tories’ 2017 plans, versus a minimum projected 7.4 per cent real terms increase from 2019-20 to 2022-23.

Conclusion

There is still, of course, much that can change. Will we see these rises in reality? Will Brexit have any impact?

We don’t know. But the picture as we have it now does at least look less bad – on the specifics of school funding - than it did in 2017.

I think we should at least hypothesise that the School Cuts campaign has played a part in this. If that hypothesis is right, it implies that campaigning can make a difference, even in the context of last week’s general election loss.

The campaign may even have played a part in shifting the governing party, under Johnson, to a stance of increasing public spending and at least softening the impact of austerity.

For that, I think we should be grateful.