Section:GDN 1N PaGe:10 Edition Date:190731 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 30/7/2019 21:03 cYanmaGentaYellowb
- The Guardian Wednesday 31 July 2019
10Inside
Brexit dashboard
Our monthly
snapshot of the
economy
Pages 28-29
National
Politics- Boris Johnson has
made audacious
policy pledges
in his leadership
campaign and since
arriving in No 10.
In the third part
of our week-long
series, the Guardian
looks beyond the
soundbites
Johnson’s promises
Education Priority
for the new PM,
but crisis schools
question impact
of cash pledges
Sally Weale
Education correspondentO
n Friday 27 September
this year , the prime
minister, Boris
Johnson, by now
settled into Downi ng
Street and just
fi ve weeks away from the Brexit
deadline, will walk out of his front
door to fi nd himself faced with an
unusual group of protesters.
More than 5,000 headteachers
from across England are promising
to walk out of their schools to take
part in a mass march on Westminster
to again highlight the crisis in
education funding that has been
making headlines for months, if not
years. It is their second such protest ,
and there will be more.
Such is the crisis in schools
that some are having to close at
lunchtime on Fridays because they
can’t aff ord to teach for a full week,
teaching jobs and teaching assistant
roles are being cut to save money,
parents are being asked to carry
out maintenance work, subjects
are being cut, and headteachers
have turned their begging bowls
to parents who are being asked to
make regular donations to keep their
schools afl oat.Johnson, famously educated at
Eton College and Oxford University,
has been quick to fl ag his concerns
about education, promising to
reverse the cuts that have blighted
England’s schools in recent years
with an additional £4.6bn a year
by 2022-23. Opinion varies on how
much of an impact his pledges will
make, given the scale and deep-
seated nature of the crisis schools in
England currently face, and the lack
of detail in the off er.
“This is the fi rst time the
government has offi cially recognised
what school leaders have been
saying for years,” said Paul
Whiteman, the general secretary
of the school leaders’ union NAHT.
“That school funding has been cut
in real terms, while at the same time
schools have been faced with rapidly
rising costs. But schools cannot
budget based on warm words alone.
There is confusion over what is
actually being promised and when.
What schools need is a clear and
concrete funding plan to be offi cially
announced – and they need it now.”
Kevin Courtney, the joint general
secretary of the National Education
Union (NEU), is more dismissive.
“Our message to Boris Johnson is
that if he is serious about a domestic
agenda which includes education as
his top priority, we need more than
just promises on the side of a bus.
We need real money for real pupils in
real schools.”
The NEU, together with the
NAHT, the Association of School
and College Leaders and the f
group of the lowest-funded local
authorities, have said an additional
£12.6bn is needed by 2022-
to reverse cuts and provide “a
standard of education that society
expects”. Johnson’s off er, which
fails to address the particularly acute
problems in special educational
needs and post-16 funding, falls
short by quite a margin.
The background to the budget
crisis in schools, according to the
Institute for Financial Studies (IFS),
is an 8% real terms cut in funding
between 2009-10 and 2017-18. A
2019 report by the Education Policy
Institute (EPI) found that almost
one in three (30%) local-authority-
maintained secondary schools were
in defi cit in 2017-18 – up from 8% in- At the same time, while pupil
numbers have gone up, teacher
recruitment and retention has
struggled to keep pace. An earlier
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