Head teachers and education ministers are locked into a public slanging match about a missing £500 million of funding that is needed to run schools over the next year. The government claims that local education authorities have held on to the cash, but they say they have passed it on or spent it on educational provision. Many schools face huge budget deficits and heads warn that after cutting down on training, maintenance and repairs ‘the only thing left to trim is staff’.
So, at a time of teacher shortage so severe that many inner city teachers have an automatic ‘reward and retention’ payment, schools are going to be sacking staff. A last-minute offer by Education Secretary Charles Clarke to allow schools to divert money from repairs to staff salaries or to borrow from richer neighbouring schools to pay this year’s salary bills is a panic response that only highlights long-term underfunding.
The shameful spectacle of accusation and counter-accusation by politicians and administrators over the missing cash is the inevitable result of a budget system that has been deliberately fragmented. This Labour government has set out to turn state provision of the education system into ‘grace and favour’ funding. Apart from the basic Education Formula Spending Share (EFSS) which is itself an arbitrary allocation of basic funds to education authorities, finance is targeted to support government policies. An initiative is announced, to ‘fast-track’ teachers, for example, and lo! a pot of money is ear-marked for it which must not be spent on anything else. Some major funds have been swallowed up in this way. One such initiative, the national numeracy strategy, has been described as ‘a £44 million failure’ by the Times Educational Supplement in May, after research showed that it has made very little difference to pupil attainment.
The reason education ministers cannot point to the missing £500 million is that there is no missing £500 million. There is no creative accounting here. The money has simply been spent, or is due to be spent, on initiatives already announced. Changes in teacher’s pay, pensions and national insurance and changes in government-required job evaluation procedures simply cost more. Some charges previously borne by central government are now transferred to schools. For example, support for Newly Qualified Teachers (NQTs), who are only allowed to teach a 90% curriculum is being withdrawn leaving schools to find the extra cash needed to put teachers in front of classes. Most education authorities will experience a cut of about 1.5% in real terms this year.
Badly miscalculating funding in this way is the by-product of turning state funding into a magic wand to wave at any time the reactionaries start to rumble. Bad pupils! – set up special units. Bad parents! – set up special fast-track courts to punish them. Bad head teachers! – ‘take them out’, as minister Stephen Byers suggested, and set up a leadership college. This government has lost the plot.
Universities – what are they good for?
You’ve got to laugh. Having set the target of 50% of the age-group to get a university level education by 2010 (currently 38%), and having agonised over whether it is elitist for posh universities to charge ‘top-up’ fees, Education Secretary Charles Clarke is suddenly overcome by doubt. What is it all for? he asks. And why should the state finance scholars at university anyway? We could keep a few ‘medieval seekers-after-truth as an adornment to our society’, but such a ‘community of seekers-after-truth’ should not be funded by the state. This was not an attack on historians, or even medieval historians, but on the whole idea of the study of the classics and the humanities. State funding, proposes Clarke, should go to those who ‘help the economy to deal with challenges posed by rapid global change’. He must mean applied science, technology and business studies (including accountancy, which he definitely needs to improve on). We suppose he would include the modern languages of major trading nations but not mother-tongues or ancient languages. The view that the purpose of education is to service capitalism and turn out an efficient and disciplined working class is as old as state education itself. We would expect no other view from that ex-leftie, ex-public school lick-spittle of privatisation, Charles Clarke.
Live from the Globe Theatre
One of the main reasons why this government is so discredited is the tendency of its leaders to announce policy on the hoof, as it were. Whenever we see a photo opportunity of Blunkett with the police or Blair with school pupils we brace ourselves for another ‘initiative’, like droppings from a rabbit. From the stage of the Globe Theatre, Blair announced the new London schools strategy, also known as ‘a package of radical reforms designed to raise standards in the capital over the next five years’. What the Prime Minister means is that 20 new schools will be built to replace the crumbling, cash-starved buildings of the 1890s that house so many of the capital’s pupils. His elector detector has picked up the rumblings of discontent from better-off parents who are angry that they cannot get their kids into the more desirable schools of their choice.
Fighting back
There’s nothing like shortage of cash to really get people going. Fury at the funding fog fired the Spring conferences of the National Union of Teachers (NUT) and the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT). The NUT has come out against the government proposal to use Teaching Assistants, some paid as little as £6 an hour, for whole class teaching as a strategy to relieve work load. The NAHT has come out against government targets to raise SATS test results, claiming that the effect of teaching to the test for 7, 11 and 14-year-olds is damaging to schools and the welfare of children. Yes, it’s time for the spinning to stop and the fight back for a democratic education system to begin. m
Susan Davidson
