Schools reducing staffing, SEND support and narrowing curricula to maintain their finances risks “damage to children’s education”, a public spending watchdog has warned.
The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) has also warned that the Department for Education relies too much on national figures for indications of schools’ financial health, and that this masks “significant variation and challenges for individual schools”.
The committee said that the DfE lacked understanding about why there was so much regional variation in school finances, with over 20 per cent of state schools in deficit in 26 local authorities as of March 2020.
It also claimed that the department “has little assurance” that the extra £4.7 billion committed for school funding in the 2021 spending review “will be enough to cover cost pressures including the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic”.
The NEU teaching union said the report highlighted “long-standing” problems, while the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL) said that heads were frustrated by the DfE’s “blithe insistence” that schools have “never had it so good”.
Secondary schools were particularly affected by straitened circumstances, the report said.
It added that the DfE’s decision to change how it calculates pupil premium funding allocations means that more deprived schools were “faring worse” than less deprived schools.
Some of the steps schools had taken to manage their finances had led to a narrowing of the curriculum they offered through cutting staff or dropping certain subjects, with hours taught in design technology falling in particular.
Schools had also reduced support for pupils with special educational needs and disabilities when trying to balance their books, according to the report.
It called for the long-awaited SEND review to be published, and said it was “concerned about the financial sustainability of the SEND system - for example, some local authorities are struggling to cover the high costs of places in some private special schools.”
The PAC also drew attention to the large reserves that some academy trusts were building up, which it said meant that “a significant amount of funding is not being spent on educating pupils currently in school”.
‘Disregard for the inequalities exposed in the pandemic’
Dame Meg Hillier MP, chairwoman of the committee, said: “The DfE’s airy assurances about the healthy books of academies in particular mask some cruel divides between the haves and have nots, unacceptable differences in life chances for our children and young people from the get-go, through no fault of their own.
“But we see the department’s apparent disregard for the inequalities exposed and exacerbated in the pandemic in the catch-up provision debacle, and in all the children and their families still struggling, years after the promised review, with the poor provision for special educational needs and disabilities.”
She added that the department must grasp that “it’s not OK” for any group of children “to be abandoned”.
The report makes a series of recommendations for the DfE, including investigating the regional variation in the financial health of state schools, as well as looking into academy trusts with reserves of over 20 per cent of their income to check these reserves are justified.
It added that the Education and Skills Funding Agency (ESFA) should gather evidence of the impact of financial pressures on schools at a local level, including whether this is leading schools to narrow their curriculum or reduce staffing levels.
It further adds that the government should set out in the SEND review the improvements it is aiming to achieve for SEND education, including the specific metrics it will use to assess these.
School leaders are ‘frustrated’
Geoff Barton, general secretary of ASCL, said it was not only the Public Accounts Committee that was frustrated by the DfE’s “blithe insistence” that schools have “never had it so good”. He said that school leaders, who’d had to live with the “reality of severely straitened budgets”, were also frustrated.
Mr Barton added: “There are many and complex reasons why there is significant variation in this financial picture and, to the DfE’s credit, it is trying to address this situation through the application of a national funding formula.
“The weakness, however, is that it is trying to improve the settlement for schools which are historically poorly funded while not having enough money in the pot to uplift the budgets for other schools, often in deprived communities, by the same amount.”
He said that this had created a situation “of winners and losers”, with the losers being schools that serve children who need the most support, and that the situation was “clearly inequitable”.
He added: “No school ever wants to curtail provision but there is a point at which there simply is not enough money in the budget to afford to deliver the full range of support that they want to provide. Many school leaders have had to make very difficult choices about where to cut back over the past few years.”
Kevin Courtney, joint general secretary of the NEU, said the report highlighted “long-standing” issues that had “seriously hindered the ability of schools to give every child the education they deserve”.
He added: “The report could not be more damming of special needs education. The fact that children most in need of support are being failed by a system that is poorly funded and resourced is a dereliction of duty and needs to be addressed.
“The NEU has been raising the same concerns as the PAC for several years. It is high time the government reverses the cuts made to school funding since 2015.
“English schools now have the largest primary class sizes this century and secondary class sizes are the highest for more than 40 years. Children and young people deserve better.”
