An ASCL survey today lays bare the bleak financial situation facing schools and colleges.

Responses from 630 headteachers, principals and business leaders show that almost all will have to make financial savings this year or in future years, or both, as a result of rising cost pressures, such as unfunded pay awards and energy bills.

In many cases, this will necessitate having to make impossible decisions about where to make cuts.

Larger class sizes; a reduced curriculum; fewer teaching assistants; less extracurricular provision; turning the heating off; scrapping plans to improve facilities.

In fact, as our survey starkly shows, all these measures will happen unless the government provides improved funding to the state education system.

Nowhere to go

Faced with the need to make huge savings, which in some secondary schools amounts to £500,000 in the current academic year, there is nowhere else to go.

As staffing is the biggest cost area for schools and colleges, it follows that many will have to reduce the number of teachers and support staff, and this inevitably has an educational impact.

Non-staff savings also have an impact, of course.

Keeping the heating off makes the learning environment less comfortable and less conducive to learning. Suspending or scrapping the new facilities that you have been carefully planning for years means that students do not benefit from something that has been identified as an important improvement.

All of this is why these decisions are so impossible and why the mood among school and college leaders is so desolate. 

One headteacher told us: “I have been here for 15 years and put my heart and soul into improving this school. It has been tough, but it has worked; this is now going to be thrown away. I have no option but to make significant redundancies across all areas of the school, from SLT to support staff.

“The impact will be a significant increase in class sizes, more work for the senior colleagues who will still be here and over time, the improvements that have been made will be eroded.

“I am completely disillusioned.”

The financial storm arrives

This is the human story. The facts and figures that lie behind this desperate situation are clear.

Schools and colleges are facing a tsunami of extra costs - nationally agreed pay awards, for which there is no additional funding from the government; soaring energy bills that are only partially met by the energy price guarantee; and other costs driven by an inflation rate currently running at 12.6 per cent on the Retail Prices Index measure of inflation.

The funding they receive from the government is nowhere near enough to weather this storm. Schools and colleges experienced huge real-terms cuts between 2010 and 2019.

Improved investment since then was only ever intended to restore school funding to 2010 levels, and rising costs mean that the government will now not even achieve that meagre objective.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies, which has crunched the numbers, estimates that by the end of this parliament in 2024-25, schools will still be 3 per cent worse off in real-terms per-pupil funding than in 2010.

The corresponding figure for colleges is 11 per cent, and for school sixth forms it is a staggering 27 per cent. It is a terrible reflection of the government’s record on education.

The pressure on special schools

The current inflationary pressures will have a brutal impact across the education sector, but the effect is likely to be particularly devastating in certain schools.

For example, special schools, which require higher numbers of staff to support our most vulnerable young people, will consequently be hit with very high costs because of unfunded pay awards.

To be clear, staff, of course, fully need and deserve these pay awards.

Indeed, they should be higher to address the grave recruitment and retention issues facing the sector. But it is simply untenable to expect schools and colleges to pay them without the money to do so.

The solution to all of this is straightforward but the politics are difficult. The education sector desperately needs more money, but this has to be done at a time of immense financial challenges for the nation, which have been at least partly created by the government. The situation would be less difficult if education had been better funded over the past decade.

But that has not been the case, and it is difficult to escape the conclusion that education is too easily seen as a soft target at times of austerity.

It must not happen again. We cannot go on with this gradual erosion of a vital public service. Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt have to do better for the nation’s children and young people. They must make education a priority.

Geoff Barton is the general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders