Let me start with an apology to all the headteachers who have seen me give talks this term.

I’ve given them a fairly bleak overview of the state of education policy and been particularly depressing on the subject of funding - confidently predicting that the Treasury would refuse to cough up an extra penny for schools given the wider financial crisis.

Well, I was wrong. The Department for Education managed to persuade the prime minister and chancellor to find an extra £2.3 billion a year for schools for the next two years, which is roughly a 4.5 per cent increase.

On current inflation predictions, this will mean the government just about meet their manifesto pledge to increase real terms per pupil funding back to 2010 levels.

Back to where we expected 

We don’t exactly know how the money will be distributed yet and there remain some big questions about whether, for instance, it will be more heavily skewed to schools in lower-income areas that have seen bigger drops in recent years, or how much will be directed towards higher needs, such as special educational needs and disabilities. But it is new money.

When you look at the wider picture of tax rises, spending constraint and falling living standards, it’s hard to argue schools haven’t done relatively very well. The government seem to have learned the lessons of 2017 when the unions’ campaign against school cuts cost them a bunch of votes.

That said, I doubt many headteachers will be sending letters of gratitude to the DfE or Downing Street. After all, this money only gets us back to what was supposed to be happening anyway before the current wave of inflation hit.

It will likely prevent some very bad outcomes, including substantial redundancies that were on the cards, but it’s going to cover higher pay, energy and food bills, not offer up exciting opportunities for school improvement.

The unknowns ahead

And of course, it depends a lot on how high those bills get. Inflation is expected to fall rapidly in the second half of next year, but if energy prices go back up that might not happen.

We’re expecting teacher strikes in January - along with most of the public sector - and that may require a higher pay deal. Until all these variables are known, we can’t know exactly how generous this additional cash sum is.

If headteachers aren’t jumping for joy, they should be at least breathing a sigh of relief. College and sixth-form leaders on the other hand will, I imagine, be spitting feathers. We’ve had endless rhetoric from the government about the importance of skills and vocational qualifications to the economy.

It was repeated again by chancellor Jeremy Hunt on Thursday when he announced that Sir Michael Barber would be offering advice on skills reform. Yet, once again, all the extra money has gone to pre-16 education. In 2025, assuming projections are correct, schools will have the same amount of money in real terms as they did in 2010. Post-16 institutions will have 15 per cent less.

This is entirely a function of politics. Repeated chancellors have wanted to announce protection for schools knowing that voters don’t think of post-16 education as a separate category, even though it is defined as such in the public accounts.

This time around putting all the money into pre-16 education allows the government to meet their 2019 schools pledge, whereas the much more sensible distribution that would have spread the same amount of money to include post-16, would not.

Other key education areas lose out

The lack of support for colleges and sixth forms is particularly egregious but there is an equal lack of generosity to other sectors adjacent to schools.

Early years got nothing extra despite inflationary cuts sinking hundreds of nurseries in the last year alone. Local authorities got a bit more for adult social care but are still way, way down from their 2010 funding levels.

And, of course, the huge drop in disposal incomes for families all the way down the income scale will lead to more hardship for young people.

Even if schools have direct protection from the effects of endless austerity, if the services around them continue to fail, and families continue to suffer, their jobs get much harder.

While school and trust leaders have been given a reprieve from some of the exceptionally painful decisions that were looming, they will now have to switch their minds to helping their communities through what will be a bleak few years.

They have, unfortunately, had to become experienced at doing so.

Sam Freedman is a former senior policy adviser at the Department for Education and a senior fellow at the Institute of Government