The Welsh government has cut the education and Welsh language revenue budget by £74.7 million and the capital budget by £40 million as it seeks to find £600 million to balance the books between now and next April.
The government said that the revenue support grant to local authorities, which pays for schools and other council-run services, would be protected but that every ministerial portfolio had to make a contribution to meeting the financial pressures faced by the government.
The minister for finance and local government, Rebecca Evans, blamed “the triple impact” of inflation, a decade of austerity and the ongoing consequences of Brexit - as well as the UK government’s “disastrous mini-budget” - for the “unprecedented pressure” on the Welsh government’s budget.
Earlier this year, Wales’ first minister Mark Drakeford said that after the UK Spring Budget in March, the Welsh budget was up to £900 million lower in real terms than when it was set at the time of the last Spending Review in 2021.
When it came to the education and Welsh language budget, the government said in a document published to coincide with Ms Evans’ Senedd update yesterday, that the key revenue savings were “reductions identified through a review of demand-led budgets and uncommitted funding”.
It said cuts would be made to the universal free school meals (FSM) budget, to higher education student support grants and initial teacher education incentives.
The document also said £40 million of capital funding would be cut from the Sustainable Communities for Learning Programme - the school and college building programme.
It said the post-16 provision budget would be reduced by £8.5 million by the “reclaiming of any grants that did not fully spend”.
The cut to the universal FSM budget is put, in the document, at £11.5 million. However, the Welsh government has said that “there remains sufficient budget to cover 2023-24 rollout plans” and it is “confident that the commitment will be met in full by September 2024 as planned”.
’Protecting education is an investment in the future’
The Welsh government started its FSM rollout in primary in September 2022 and has committed to completing the phasing in of free meals by September 2024.
Responding to the announcement, Laura Doel, national secretary of the NAHT Cymru school leaders’ union, said such a significant funding cut to the education and Welsh language budget was “deeply concerning”, but not unexpected given the £900 million gap in the Welsh government’s budget.
She called for core school funding to be protected and a pause on projects that “do little to improve the education attainment of children and young people”, including reviewing the school day and year.
She also warned that universal FSM could not become “another costly burden for schools to pick up later in the financial year”.
She added: “Protecting education is an investment in the future of Wales and therefore the government and local authorities must continue to work with education unions and the profession to keep the school gates open.
“Current funding levels are already seeing schools having to make redundancies to balance their books. Anything further would seriously jeopardise schools’ ability to function.”
