Section:GDN 1N PaGe:11 Edition Date:190731 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 30/7/2019 21:03 cYanmaGentaYellowb
Wednesday 31 July 2019 The Guardian •11EPI report found that just 60% of
teachers are still working in state-
funded schools fi ve years after
starting.
Johnson’s education pledges
began with a blunder. During the
leadership campaign he promised to
raise minimum per-pupil funding to
£5,000 a year in secondary schools
and £4,000 in primaries. His aim
was to appease Tory MPs who have
made life uncomfortable for the
government, repeatedly railing
against higher funding in (deprived)
London at the expense of (less
disadvantaged) schools in their
constituencies.
SchoolsWeek calculated that
Johnson’s big off er would in fact
amount to a tiny sum – around
£50m in extra funding or a 0.1%
increase in overall school spending.
“They thought it was a large fi gure
and it turned out to be small,” said
Jonathan Simons, who was head of
education in the prime minister’s
strategy unit when Gordon Brown
was prime minister and is now
director of education at the Public
First policy consultancy. “Things are
done at speed. You don’t have a huge
amount of specialists around. They
overestimated the cost of it.”
Johnson’s subsequent
commitment to reverse the cuts in
per-pupil spending to back to 2015
levels was a much more substantial
off er. “There’s a political driver for
this,” says Simons. “Education is
rising up the political agenda – inpolling we know it is one of the
top three or four issues for the
public. We know in 2017 that a lot
of people switched their vote from
Conservative to Labour on the issue
of schools funding.” The Tories, he
says, are “obsessed” with winning
back the 18- to 24-year-old cohort,
and giving more money to schools is
part of that.
Luke Sibieta, an IFS research
fellow who has done vast amounts
of research into education spending,
agrees the additional £4.6bn per
annum is a signifi cant increase in
education funding, which could
make a real diff erence to school
budgets and what is happening in
classrooms. How much of an impact
it has depends when the money will
be made available and what it will
have to cover.
“The £4.6bn is almost set in
stone now, particularly now he
has mentioned it in the House of
Commons. That will be a signifi cant
boost to school funding, enough to
reverse the 8% cuts since 2010.
The big question is when that will
occur. Schools will be keen to
receive it soon, given the pressures
they are facing at the moment. The
other big question mark is what it
will include.”
If it has to cover, for example,
increases in employer pension
contributions, which will cost £1.5bn
a year alone, it will disappear rapidly,
says Sibieta. There’s also the recent
2.75% pay rise for teachers to fundfrom September – the government
has so far agreed to fund only 0.75%;
the remainder will have to be found
by schools.
Sibieta says the devil will be in
the detail of the Johnson off er, but
he agrees with Whiteman that the
£4.6bn marks a signifi cant shift by
the Conservatives, who for years
batted off headteachers’ cries for
help, blindly insisting record levels
of money were going into schools.
“They are acknowledging there have
been big cuts in school budgets –
that’s a big change in itself.”
Jules White, the headteacher at
Tanbridge House school in Horsham,
West Sussex, and the organiser of
September’s march on Downing
Street, has listened carefully to what
Johnson has to off er and there are
currently no plans to call off the
protest.
“Input of £4.6bn will be welcome
but that will only take us back to
where we were in 2010,” he said,
speaking from a blustery cliff top
in Jersey on the second day of his
summer holiday. “The temptation
for a short-term fi x to quieten heads
and parents down will not work.
“We are crying out for long
investment – not only in fi nancial
terms but in meaningful integrated
decision making, too. The question
is, will Mr Johnson seize the moment
and dare to be diff erent, or tread
the same path that has let down our
schools and pupils for so long and
so badly?”▲ Education
spending
has become
a political
necessity for
Boris Johnson
and the Tories,
according to the
policy expert
Jonathan
Simons^Source: Teacher Labour Market in England
annual report 2019, NFERThe DfE forecasts secondary
schools will need 15,000 more
teachers as pupil numbers rise
% change since 2010-- Pupils • Forecast rise • Teachers • Need
The majority of local authority
maintained schools spent more
than their income in 2016-- Primary • Secondary
051015%0510152025%11-1212-1313-1414-1515-1616-Source: House of Commons education committee, a
10-year plan for school and college funding, 2017-More than a quarter of local
authority maintained secondary
schools were in deficit in 2016-- Primary • Secondary
2011 2018 202501030
20405060%11-1212-1313-1414-1515-1616-‘We need more than
just promises on the
side of a bus ... we
need real money’Kevin Courtney
NEU joint general secretary‘Schools cannot
budget based on
warm words. They
need a clear plan’Paul Whiteman
NAHT general secretaryIn numbers
The funding equation£4.6bn
The amount that Boris Johnson has
pledged to increase school funding
by per annum by 2022-£12bn
The fi gure that teaching unions and
school leaders say is required to
reverse the cuts and provide the
education that society expects8%
The real-terms cut in school spending
per pupil between 2009-10 and 2017-
18, according to the IFSILLUSTRATION: BEN LONGDENРЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS
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ТОВИИЛЛАNEU joint general secretaryNEU joint general secretaryNEU joint general secretaryNEU joint general secretaryГГР
NEU joint general secretaryNEU joint general secretaryУУПKevin Courtney
ПKevin Courtney
NEU joint general secretaryNEU joint general secretaryПKevin CourtneyKevin CourtneyKevin CourtneyKevin CourtneyППАА"What'sNews" News"VK.COM/WSNWS