If you work in a school, there’s every chance that you caught the headlines about headteachers marching through Westminster on Friday to deliver a letter to Number 10 about the funding crisis. If, however, you were a parent, governor or proverbial man on the street, then it’s just as likely that the whole thing passed you by.

TV journalist Robert Peston would have us believe that to be heard, headteachers should have been more rowdy. Maybe so. Perhaps the passionate-but-professional approach isn’t enough to make the top headlines. But surely with schools represented from every community in the land, we ought to be able to make an impact with the news that schools are desperately fearful in the light of current funding.

The trouble is, it’s so easy to muddy the waters. If you did happen to hear mention of the protest on the news, you’d have also heard schools minister Nick Gibb or one of his colleagues quoting the same carefully constructed claim about the extent to which funding has increased. And while the best journalists will have pushed, challenged and pointed out the inaccuracies in this line, it’s increasingly hard to make sense of school funding. Goodness knows, I struggle to make sense of it, what with pots of money that change from year to year and costs that seem to go up almost weekly, let alone the huge number of extra pupils being accommodated.

For those who are used to hearing the occasional complaint from the main teaching unions, it will be easy to put the protests down to moaning teachers and their unions. This was different: it was headteachers not roused by their militant left-wing union leaders, but getting together of their own accord to drive home the message that school funding isn’t working.

Reluctance to shout

But driving that message home is hard. It would seem to be so easy to share the message with parents: if school budgets are so tight, why not just show the details to parents? If only it were that simple.

For a start, particularly in primary schools, there will always be a teacher for the class, and for the most part, schools are still welcoming children in at 9am and keeping them safe throughout the day. It’s not the headline stuff that’s getting lost, it’s all the important stuff behind the scenes - often things that are just not appropriate for the school newsletter.

Some schools will have braved the backlash and asked for money. In some cases it’s for glue sticks and highlighters; in others it’s for trips and events. But few headteachers will want to publicly shout about the cuts that can be the most damaging.

We can’t tell parents that this year Jacob in Year 4 really needed some additional counselling, but that we can no longer afford to buy in the additional support he would have received three years ago. It’s hard to explain to parents that their children’s lessons might be slightly less well-planned because their teachers have less time out of class to prepare them. No headteacher wants to write to parents explaining that they worry at lunchtimes because supervision has had to be cut to the bone.

But perhaps we do need to find ways of making the challenges more obvious. Schools should find ways of explaining to parents the rising costs and falling incomes, and to make direct links to how continued change will affect their children. Sometimes that will be unpalatable for them and for us. But in reality, the whole situation is very unpalatable, and it seems that politicians are still not listening.

Michael Tidd is headteacher at Medmerry Primary School in West Sussex. He tweets @MichaelT1979