Michelle Gay is the headteacher of Osborne primary, a 270-pupil local authority school in Erdington, on the north-eastern edge of Birmingham. In total, 25% of her pupils are categorised as having special educational needs, 39% have a first language other than English, and 43% are eligible for free school meals.
Osborne primary has an urgent issue: a lack of money. Ofsted rates it as “a good school with outstanding leadership”, and since 2016 its numbers have been expanding: in September 2019 it will take on another new class, but Gay won’t have enough money to pay for a new teacher, so the teaching will be done by existing staff. She says she needs at least 13 classroom assistants to help children who need extra support – not least those who need help with English – but only has 11. The school used to get about £100,000 a year from Birmingham city council and other agencies to pay three staff who work on child protection and supporting parents, as well as counselling children with mental health issues. That money now has to come from the school’s own budgets. So to save £1,500, swimming lessons have been cut back, along with £2,000 worth of music tuition. Gay has explained all this on ITV Evening News and in the pages of the Birmingham Mail, but to no avail.
Last year came perhaps the most drastic step of all, when she took the decision to cut the school week by half a day, meaning that most children now go home at 1pm on Fridays. The move still leaves the school meeting its legal requirements for teaching time, but staff now do their planning and preparation work in the hours freed up by children leaving early – which means their classes don’t have to be taken care of and the school saves a precious £35,000 a year. Gay says she took the decision after talking to another headteacher who had done the same; now “a couple of other schools in Erdington are doing it and it’s starting to spread across the city”.
It says something about life in modern Britain that in response to the change, many parents’ main anxiety was the prospect of their children losing out on a hot meal; so it was decided to close the school doors after lunch.
In 2014, with his customary revolutionary zeal, the then education secretary, Michael Gove, said he wanted to “see state schools offer a school day nine or 10 hours long”, but that was obviously for the birds. Examples of schools cutting their hours began to surface about a year ago, and have now taken their place in the cacophony of noise about reduced budgets, shrinking staff numbers, and a mess of factors that make things even worse – not least the drive to push local councils out of education and increase the number of academies.
At a time when the economy is changing fast and the world of work is being transformed, it would be nice to imagine state schools full of iPads, cutting-edge computer science lessons and coding clubs. But that is not the reality at all. Talking to headteachers over the last week, I have heard about insufficient staff numbers, rising class sizes, rusting minibuses, neglected repairs and curtailed extracurricular activity. It sounds depressingly similar to the experience of those of us unlucky enough to have been educated during the Thatcher years.
So how has this happened? In England, funding per pupil for education between the ages of five and 16 stayed just about flat in real terms between 2010 and 2016, but schools were then hammered by changes to national insurance payments and pension arrangements that led to a cut of about 5% in their per-pupil spending. As the baby boom of the early 21st century pushed up pupil numbers, money for vital educational support was hacked back: in 2015, for instance, the then chancellor, George Osborne, announced the phasing out of the £600m-a-year education services grant, which helped with everything from safeguarding, through speech and language support, to tackling truancy and maintaining school playing fields.
Another outrage has been the drastic cut in funding for the education of 16- to 19-year-olds, which suffered a real terms drop of 17.5% between 2010 and 2017: terrible news for schools with sixth forms, and proof that talk from Conservative ministers about aspiration usually dissolves into cant.
As with so many things, Brexit has ensured that none of this has acquired nearly enough political traction, even as the picture has become inescapably clear. In late 2016 the National Audit Office said that schools in England would have to make savings of £3bn by 2019-20 in the interests of “financial sustainability”. After the 2017 election it was announced that schools would get an extra £1.3bn over the next two years, though much of the money was taken from their building and repairs budget. Besides, the extra cash only reduces the financial hole identified by the NAO, rather than filling it – and according to the National Education Union, it will leave a total national shortfall of £2.2bn in 2019-20 alone.
Meanwhile, as the number of both primary and secondary schools that are running deficits increases, this year the government will take the first step towards a new national funding formula, which redistributes a pot of money – broadly speaking, moving it away from big metropolitan areas and towards smaller cities and shire counties. No one should be celebrating: for many of the schools who nominally benefit, their increases will neither make up for past cuts nor keep pace with rising costs; while for those who clearly suffer, it will be another blow. At Osborne primary, it is another source of uncertainty about the future: right now, all Michelle Gay knows is that in the last year basic per-pupil funding has fallen from £3,071 a year to £2,756.
Austerity may have blitzed local authorities, but schools still under their control at least have some kind of financial safety net. However, if a school is one of the 1,600 or so standalone academies, or part of a small chain – or even one of the bigger multi-academy trusts that cannot cope with tight finances – its staff and parents might well find that much-vaunted “independence” actually leaves them in dire trouble. This is part of the reason why academies and free schools have started to hit the wall: an example of one Tory policy threatening to ruin another, which is some measure of the stupidity at work.
From any rational perspective, all this looks like the kind of chaos that helps nobody. But, as with austerity in general, there is a clear sense of cuts serving a particular set of rightwing beliefs. What, after all, does an underfunded school system mean in practice?
Children with special needs are being pushed out of state schools. The curriculum is being stripped back to its basics. And the stuff that desiccated minds would have you believe is unnecessary guff – art, music, drama – is the first to go. Yet grammar schools will reportedly benefit from a new £50m “expansion fund”.
Look closely and you see yet another manifestation of something very familiar: a country with a hacked-back state, where the people in power cling on to a sepia-tinted vision that has nothing to do with the demands of the 21st century, but has a human cost so huge it is becoming almost impossible to measure.
• John Harris is a Guardian columnist