On Facebook last week, I encouraged my 600 or so friends to play a little game. The title was: “By how much is the government starving my school of cash?”

Anyone could play, as long as they had access to the internet and their child was in a maintained state school. The object of the game was to type their child’s school name in the search engine of a website which would calculate how much worse off it would be by 2019 under current funding levels. Part of the fun was then to compare how their school fared against others in their locality or nationwide. (Oh come on, we’ve been fed a diet of Ofsted and league tables for more than two decades. Of course we like to compare schools.)

I pitched the exercise as a game to engage those who are otherwise uninterested, bored or fed up of my political rants on social media, though in reality it didn’t take much encouragement to get roped in. As parents we rarely have an insight into this sort of financial information and the shock factor was, in itself, quite compelling.

The statistics showed that my own daughter’s school risked losing three teachers, which was comparable to primaries with similar pupil numbers in our county, Oxfordshire. I then looked up my old primary school in a particularly disadvantaged area of the West Midlands. Per pupil funding there would decline by an eye-watering £500 per year per child, with three potential teacher job losses - not easy to sustain in a one-form entry school.

By mid-afternoon the game was really taking off and the ripples of concern and shock were palpable among parents on my friends list. One after another they were posting their own school’s figures. Four teaching posts to go, one said, alerting other parents in their locality. Five jobs, said another, asking how this was even possible.

Knowledge and wisdom are being lost

One mum looked up her children’s former secondary, where 24 members of staff were at risk. Twenty-four! That surely equated to a catastrophic reduction in the curriculum and whole departments disappearing. Thank God her children had already left school, she said.

Another parent had recently noticed that her son’s choice of subjects at GCSE was significantly smaller than her daughter’s when she did her options years earlier, so the prospect of teacher job losses came as no surprise. It’s a good job he’s academically inclined, she said, because a creative or artistic child would have little left in the curriculum to engage them. A father noted an increase in non-uniform days and requests from the school for donations. And so it went on.

The eight-page report on the funding crisis in last week’s TES made further grim reading, not least because it highlighted the personal and professional cost this crisis was having on real people. As a parent, it is heart-breaking to read of the loss of so much experience and expertise from our classrooms.

We have to ask ourselves where all this is going. What is the bigger picture here? What vision do the Conservatives have for our children’s education and their futures? The current trajectory seems to be leading nowhere good.

In my own locality the free school has a decent reputation and is providing much-needed places to our burgeoning town, so I hesitate to be too critical. The same is not true, however, in areas where free schools have been allowed to open even though there are surplus places. And where is the evidence that parents want more grammar schools? We don’t, particularly - we just want the schools we have to be properly funded.

Reckless approach is no laughing matter

It goes beyond even that. Where is the planning for the future needs of the country? How many doctors do we need? How many engineers? Will we have enough architects, builders and plumbers for the construction industry? How are we going to encourage young people into apprenticeships when they won’t have the necessary experience or vocational qualifications post-16 for entry?

In fact, has any government in modern times ever done a skills audit to find out what we can do as a population and where we need to target education and training? I don’t recall such an exercise.

Instead of a strategic approach to funding and planning education, we have the absurd scenario of heads being advised by the Department for Education that they need to renegotiate their photocopier contracts to make “efficiencies”. Who do they think they are talking to? This from a government that has fragmented education provision, making collaboration and economies of scale at local level more difficult. Such a cavalier, disingenuous attitude would be laughable if it wasn’t so serious.

The contempt - I don’t know what else to call it - with which some politicians hold our state education system, and all those who learn and work within it, has been noted. It could not be clearer, in fact.

With a general election coming up, we need to think carefully about where we put our cross.  

Dorothy Lepkowska is a freelance journalist and writer. And a parent.

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