Schools to face challenging budget cuts, TES reports

TES has reported that Tony Foot, director of the Department for Education’s funding group, is under ‘no illusion’ about the financial challenges schools are due to face as a result of rising costs and real terms budget cuts.

Foot made the declaration at the school funding conference in London, acknowledging that whilst schools fared better than other parts of the public sector in the Spending Review, it faced a difficult time ahead.

He said: “I’m under no illusion, in all of the conferences I go to and the colleagues that I talk to, that the next few years are going to be highly challenging for the system, the schools budget is protected in real terms. There’s a lot of nuance around what that really means in practice.

“So to be very clear, it means the core DSG [dedicated schools grant] and the pupil premium as a total pot are protected in real terms, as is the cash amount per pupil in the DSG as a whole and the cash rates within the pupil premium.

“It doesn’t mean real terms protection per pupil, and it doesn’t mean protection for all elements of schools funding.”

Foot explained that the Education Services Grant, which is handed to academies to cover the cost of services that would otherwise be provided by local authorities, is expected to be ‘phased out’, saving £600m.

He also added that per-pupil funding would fall in real terms to ‘lower than the system has been used to over many years’.

He said: “All of those together clearly mean the context for schools over the coming few years is going to be a challenging one and we need to be planning now very actively in order to meet it.”

Mary Bousted, general secretary of the ATL teachers’ union, said that Foot’s comments were a ‘refreshingly frank admission that schools are going to find the next few years extremely difficult.’

She said: “When rising costs are taken into account, schools’ real terms budgets are falling. That’s happening at the same time as rising pupil numbers and problems with teacher supply. These various things will come to a fever pitch.”