In a government webinar this week setting out the recent teacher pay offer, heads were told that, “on average”, a 4 per cent rise should be affordable for them.

The NEU teaching union said in a blog post just days before that their own analysis suggested that between two in five (42 per cent) and three in five (58 per cent) schools would have to make cuts next year to afford it.

Bizarre as it may seem, these two positions aren’t actually poles apart.

Consider the NEU’s analysis: exactly halfway between 42 per cent and 58 per cent is 50 per cent. That means that a reasonable middle way is that their figures show that 50 per cent of schools would have to make cuts to afford the pay offer.

Flip this round and the analysis presumably shows that 50 per cent of schools will not have to make cuts. It’s not wrong, then, if you’re presenting this with a positive spin, to say that the “average” school will be able to afford the pay offer.

The real difference between the positions of the NEU and the government, therefore, appears to be what they deem to be acceptable: the former believes all schools should be able to afford the proposed pay rise; the latter that the average school can. 

The lottery of affordability

Some in government may argue that affordability will ultimately come down to how well finances are managed in each school - that the split is down to individual budget decisions, not the conditions in which a school finds itself. In short, that there is enough money in the system for the average school to succeed, and therefore deviations are a school’s problem.

That reading does not really stand up. Analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies suggests that affordability could skew negatively towards special schools or those in London, where funding has not grown as quickly as in other areas.

There are countless other factors to consider aside from this, too, and many of them come down to little more than a lottery, rather than a question of good or poor financial management.

To give one example alone: when did the school’s energy deal expire? How long-term was it? Was it a flex deal or a fixed-price one? Nobody could feasibly expect even the most astute school business manager renewing a gas or electricity contract back in 2020 to have the foresight to have got all these answers “right”.

For special schools, the lottery factor is even more pronounced, given their local authority can be the gatekeeper for a large chunk of their cash. Special-school trust leaders that run settings in different areas have regularly spoken of how the exact financial position of each is part-predicated on whether they fall on one side of a council boundary or not.

In the DfE’s webinar, these sorts of schools - those with concerns about how they could meet the demands of the offer financially - were told they could contact the Education and Skills Funding Agency or their local authority. Good luck with that, was the response from those schools: there’s no money to be had there, either. 

A spreadsheet-first approach

Is it a wilful misreading of the education budget landscape that has occurred here? It’s likely more down to a mentality that exists in government sometimes labelled “treasury brain”.

Last week, education secretary Gillian Keegan spoke to Sky News’ Sophy Ridge to justify the offer to teachers - and its affordability.

“Don’t worry about school funding,” was the message she gave to parents.

Analysing the interview afterwards, a slightly baffled Sam Coates - the channel’s deputy political editor - described her tact as a “rather spreadsheet-first, Treasury approach”.

To many who manage finances in schools, this will have rung true.

You can throw a bunch of numbers into Excel, run a formula and get told that actually, it looks OK. But for many running England’s schools - maybe as many as half - this won’t chime with their own experience.

For now, it looks as though the discussion about whether schools can afford the pay offer might be an academic one. Unions broadly expect that their members will reject it, and what happens next is anyone’s guess.

But the question of whether any government that views education as a priority can deem it acceptable to use the finances of an average school as a benchmark for what leaders can afford will keep coming back, so long as it’s the metric used.