The latest staff pay awards will “disproportionately” hit special schools and risk putting them on a “fast-track route to becoming unviable” financially, leaders are warning.
Last week it was announced that experienced teachers would get a 5 per cent pay rise from September 2022, which is higher than the 3 per cent figure the Department for Education had originally proposed in March.
And yesterday local authorities offered school support staff a flat pay rise of £1,925, with unions saying they plan to “consider” the proposal.
Headteachers in mainstream schools warned that the announcements have come after many leaders had set their budgets for next year, and with no additional funding.
But leaders at special schools, which tend to spend more on staffing, say their budgets will be hit particularly hard by pay rises.
School staff pay rises: special schools ‘will have to cut jobs’
Warren Carratt, chief executive of Nexus Multi Academy Trust (MAT), a group of special schools across Yorkshire, said that the situation would “inevitably lead to special and alternative provision (AP) schools making cuts to key personnel” to achieve a balanced budget.
On the teacher pay increase, he said: “The impact on these schools is not even a consideration in the government statement on affordability, and I fear we are on a fast-track route to our special and AP schools becoming unviable.”
He added: “Our most vulnerable pupils and the staff who support them have been ignored by the government again, and the financial impact of this will be disastrous.”
Special schools and AP settings are funded differently from mainstream schools.
Instead of being allocated core funding through the National Funding Formula, much of special and AP schools’ money is first distributed to local authorities, which then have flexibility in how much they give directly to special and AP settings.
In addition, special schools often spend more on staffing. While the DfE says that 70 to 80 per cent of a school’s expenditure should typically be on staffing costs, levels can be above 85 per cent at special and AP schools.
Regarding support staff pay rises, Mr Carratt said: “Special and AP schools receive no additional government funding for teaching assistant pay increases, despite employing far more non-teaching staff than mainstream schools to keep children safe and their care needs met. And local authorities do not have to increase top-up funding for this. Special and AP schools cannot insist local authorities increase funding.”
Sudhi Pathak, chief operating officer at Eden Academy Trust, a group of special schools, said that he had budgeted for a £250,000 rise to non-teaching staff pay but was now faced with a rise of closer to £800,000.
He said some schools in the trust would have to dip into reserves intended to meet the cost of work such as roof repairs or boiler improvements, and would also have to look at other ways to cut costs.
“In special schools, we have pupils with very high needs and we have learning support systems in place for this. In a class with eight to 10 pupils, we might have a teacher and two or three support staff. That’s disproportionately high compared to if we were a mainstream school.
“As it is now, we will struggle. Things we might look at - if we’ve got 11 classes with 10 kids in each, we might go down to 8 classes. But when you have less staff, then, from a safety point of view and general learning point of view, it does become unworkable. To me, it’s unsustainable.
“It’s already reached the point where everything has been cut to the bone really. There isn’t really anything where we can say it’s a ‘nice to have’.”
Safety fears
Pauline Aitchison, chair of the National Network of Special Schools for School Business Professionals, said that many special schools were struggling with increased costs and would not be able to fund the rises on “already-stretched budgets”.
She added: “Special schools, in particular, have disproportionately high numbers of support staff and many special schools already missed out on the schools’ supplementary grant earlier in the year. Many schools will have to consider reducing staff to cover the increased costs, on top of other rising costs.”
The schools supplementary grant - which is worth £1.2 billion in 2022-23 - is designed to provide support for schools with extra costs, such as the National Insurance rise. But special-school leaders raised concerns earlier this year that the allocation of the funding was a “postcode lottery”, with some local authorities not planning to pass the cash directly on to them.
Ms Aitchison added: “The special sector invests in more staff than mainstream, and must recruit and retain high-quality teaching and non-teaching staff to support their pupils.
“It is vital that schools supporting the most vulnerable students receive adequate funding, especially as they address the impact of the pandemic.”
Simon Knight, headteacher at Frank Wise School in Banbury, Oxfordshire, said that the “continual layering of unfunded costs” on schools was having a “disproportionate impact on special schools”, partly because of the high number of support staff these schools have.
“We also have less manoeuvrability with regards to staffing, as reductions can impact on both safety and the ability of schools to meet the requirements set out in the pupils’ education, health and care plans (EHCPs),” he said.
“The government’s understanding of special-school finances is utterly disconnected from our reality and it is increasingly challenging to set a balanced budget and serve our communities. Additional funding into schools is desperately needed but any solution appears long in the making.”.
Similarly, Chris Eracleous, chief operating officer for a trust of two special schools in the London Borough of Brent, said the pay award “disproportionately puts pressure” on special schools.
She said that, as a result of the rise, what would likely happen is that the schools in the trust would have to make classes larger, so they would have a “lower number of teachers and recruit for fewer vacancies where they arise in the future”.
She added that, as a MAT, she felt that funding paid by the DfE should come directly to the trust, as it does with mainstream schools, rather than going to the local authority.
“I do feel that special schools lose out by having pots of funding handed to the local authority,” she said.
Elsewhere, mainstream schools with a high proportion of pupils with special educational needs and disabilities - sometimes referred to as SEND “magnet” schools - warned that they would be penalised for being inclusive, and be forced to make redundancies.
A DfE spokesperson said: “We have accepted the recommendations of the independent School Teachers’ Review Body for the coming academic year and are awarding teachers the highest pay awards in a generation.
“Increases to high needs funding in the next financial year mean that investment will increase by £1.65bn between 2021-22 and 2023-24 - an uplift of 21 per cent supporting local authorities and schools with the increasing costs they are facing.”
