Amid growing concerns about the impact of inflation and rising energy bills on Scottish schools, East Renfrewshire Council may have provided a sign of things to come.
In a document laying out budgetary pressures and potential action to address them, the council left a stark message this week.
The council says it “will have to make very difficult decisions about what levels of service it can continue to provide over the next three years”.
The “budget briefing” document for 2023-26 contains a list of potential cuts, in education and beyond, stating that “not all of these savings will have to be taken but it’s likely many of them will”. It adds that the process of identifying potential cuts had been ”incredibly difficult”.
If all of these measures were taken, the council document says, “up to 550 jobs could be at risk over three years”.
Of course, while councils have said repeatedly over recent years that they will try to protect education budgets, those very same budgets represent the biggest chunk of council spending. For years councils have been saying that drastic cuts to education will be unavoidable at some stage, and it seems that moment is fast coming over the horizon.
How council cuts could affect schools
So what is now officially deemed a possibility for schools in East Renfrewshire, where total education expenditure is £157.6 million (and the combined expenditure for all other council areas where possible cuts are identified is £166.3 million)?
And what are the factors being weighed up in deciding which of the various undesirable courses of action to pursue?
1. ‘Reduction in devolved school management budgets involving teachers’, saving £13.6 million
The council, in its budget briefing document, launches straight in with a barrage of drastic-sounding measures. It could:
- Reduce the funding for staff to work with the “lowest-performing 20 per cent of pupils”.
- Reduce the length of the pupil week in primary schools from 25 hours to 22.5 hours.
- Remove funding for smaller maths and English class sizes in secondary schools.
- Reduce the number of pupil support teachers.
- Reduce the funding that helps schools “address equity and support pupil needs”.
- Reduce absence-cover funding.
- Remove additional teachers who have helped with the recovery from Covid-19.
- Review management structures in all schools.
- Review staffing and management structures in early learning and childcare centres.
2. ‘Reduction in devolved school management budgets involving other staff groups and budgets’, saving £1.4 million
The removal of funding for Easter schools and outdoor education is a possibility, as is cuts to funding for school librarians, multimedia school technicians and bilingual support workers. There could be an impact, too, on pupil support assistants and school-based business and budget support staff. Reductions are possible in classroom supplies budgets and in “funding devolved to schools and early learning and childcare establishments to support improvement”. Some trips, activities and clubs in the special sector could also be affected.
However, the council underlines that pursuing the options above “will have a very serious negative impact on the quality of learning and teaching, attainment, achievement, wellbeing, pupil support, equity and would increase the pupil-to-teacher ratio”. It would also “severely impact career opportunities for teachers, particularly newly qualified teachers”, while reducing the number of school support staff and early years staff would “impact on both the workload of school management and other departmental and council services”.
So what else can the council do with education budgets? The answer, looking at options 3, 4 and 5 (amounting to savings of just £4.9 million), seems to be that there is no alternative if the priority is to seek the level of savings represented by 1 and 2 (£15 million combined).
3. ‘Reduction in centrally-based education staff and budgets’, saving £3.3 million
Specifically, the council lists janitorial, catering and cleaning staff, as well as quality-improvement officers, educational psychologists, adult-learning staff, the education leadership team, business and budget support staff and its early years team.
But it warns: “This option will have a very serious negative impact on the quality of learning and teaching, attainment, achievement and wellbeing. It will also lead to a reduction in the range of school meals and a reduction in cleaning standards and janitorial support across the estate”, while reducing support staff would have an impact on both the workload of school management and other council services.
Other options include reduced funding for hospital tuition, speech and language therapy, campus police officers and support for children attending the Junior Conservatoire in Glasgow, or a “reduction in the centrally based funding/budgets which are used to support schools and services to deliver the national [education] agenda”.
4. ‘Further savings’, amounting to £1.5 million
This is the vaguest of the various possibilities, and the council admits that “identifying further savings would be extremely challenging”. It suggests using less energy, as well as finding more (unspecified here) cuts in both central education and devolved school management budgets.
5. ‘Increase Income’
This option will not inspire much hope. The only suggestion is to increase the price of school meals by 20p - raising a paltry £100,000.
The message is implicit but clear: there is no way to raise a significant amount of money through education, so cuts must be considered.
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Of course, it is a timeworn tactic to put a range of horrendous-sounding cuts on the table, knowing that you are unlikely to ever go ahead with the worst of them. Then, when you proceed with an option that is not quite as bad, it can be presented as listening to the public and rescuing them from the worst-case scenarios with some clever budgeting.
Yet things feel different this time. Ever since the global financial crisis of 2008, there have been dire warnings about the inexorable ripple effects for education in Scotland, which never quite come to pass. Even now, the new East Renfrewshire document suggests that the council can use £5 million of reserves to “delay savings” (Not so very long ago, of course, it was considered unthinkable that a council would have to dip into its emergency reserves.)
Now, however, education may be coming into the eye of a perfect storm, and - as the new East Renfrewshire budget briefing document lays out - the possible cuts in other council budgets are relatively small. Covid and the cost-of-living crisis have ramped up the financial pressure on public-sector staff and, at the same time, the Scottish government is insisting that there is no money for the level of public-sector pay rises being sought.
In short, there is not much sugaring of this pill: local authority budgets are under more pressure than they have been for many years - and, this time, much of the pain is likely to be felt by schools.
Henry Hepburn is Scotland editor at Tes. He tweets @Henry_Hepburn
