The education system is starting to show cracks due to the ongoing austerity policies of the government, a leading academic has said.
Becky Allen, director of the Centre for Education Improvement Science at the UCL Institute of Education, told delegates at a conference in London today that she was particularly worried about children who needed extra support at a time when schools have had to make cuts.
“During boom times, the school system breathes a sigh of relief,” said Professor Allen. “There are pay rises; reduced contact time; we give teachers teaching assistants, which makes their lives easier and it makes the workforce happier; we get rid of teacher shortages and it all feels sustainable.
“So what do we do during austerity? We pull the system into reverse. We become asset sweaters; teaching hours rise for less pay; teaching starts to feel like having a busy or nightmare work day, and it feels like that day after day after day.
“You can do it for a while, but in time, the system starts to crack and that’s what we’re starting to see today.”
Professor Allen added that the relationship between money and pupil outcomes was complicated. She said that when money in the system increased, “perhaps standards didn’t rise so much, but perhaps they stopped the system cracking up and perhaps that’s something worth doing in the long run”.
Speaking at the Publishers Association/British Educational Suppliers Association educational publishers’ conference, Professor Allen said that, in the past 20 years, there had been an expansion of schools’ work on broader social support to ensure that pupils didn’t fall through the cracks.
She pointed out that such work could be life-changing for the pupils it helped, but did not do a great deal to raise average test scores.
Professor Allen added that, amid ongoing austerity, she was now “fearful about what happens when you cut budgets”. She said that her greatest concern was about the loss of social and pastoral support.
“The combination of financial pressure and accountability is squeezing children who are expensive to teach out of the mainstream system,” she warned, adding: “These are children who have special educational needs or just have behavioural difficulties, which means they find it hard to cope in a class of 30 children.”
Professor Allen said that increasing budgets led to the development of particular managerial and pedagogical approaches, such as heads of departments carrying out many lesson observations for performance reviews, or Reception and infant classrooms having the staff ratios to allow children to work on different activities in small groups - and that these practices did not necessarily change when budgets then shrunk.
“Money does not educate children, although without it we can do nothing,” she concluded. “To improve schools with less money, we cannot just do what we already do, but a little more efficiently - that is just not sustainable.
“Funding constraints and technological innovation must push us into new ideas on how to deliver education.”
A Department for Education spokesperson said: “Children only have one chance at an education - they all deserve the best. Since 2017, we have given every local authority more money for every pupil in every school, while allocating the biggest increases to the schools that have been most underfunded.
“While there is more money going into our schools than ever before, we recognise the budgeting challenges schools face and that we are asking them to do more. That’s why we’re supporting schools and head teachers to make the most of every pound.”
