Any hope of education getting extra cash to make up for school funding cuts was dashed this week by the chancellor. Old Mother Hammond apparently told the Cabinet that the cupboard was now bare after giving the NHS an extra £394 million per week in real terms - or £20 billion, overall.
School leaders are having to grapple with a real-terms reduction of 4.6 per cent and £2.8 billion has already been cut since 2015 - or, as education secretary Damian Hinds prefers to put it, “there is more money going into our schools in this country than ever before”.
This austerity has given rise to a breed of “headtrepeneurs” - headteachers who are trying to plug holes in budgets by selling the schools wares (be it influence, expertise or use of property) to the highest bidder.
Schools, of course, have many assets, aside from their premises. They are at the heart of their community, they have a huge communication reach and they are, in general, a trusted source. So to businesses, schools are useful. And it seems businesses are now very useful to schools, too. So useful, in fact, that a headteacher like Chris Dyson manages to get £300,000-worth of cash and free goods out of them every year (see pages 38-43).
That money, says Dyson, pays for all the things that a school needs to provide: school trips, manageable class sizes, breakfast and after-school clubs, resources and more.
He’s not the only one. Other schools raise money by renting out their buildings or selling their expertise for training. Again, this cash goes towards, they say, essentials for their pupils.
Let’s be under no illusion: this kind of cash-raising is now taking place on an unprecedented scale. Where once schools were happy to get £100 from a PTA karaoke night, they’re now having to try to find more than a thousand times that. And fundraising has to be much more refined. Budget cuts mean the extra cash is no longer the icing on the cake, it’s providing the ingredients for the whole educational offering.
The problem is, as Jamie Barry, head of Parsons Street Primary School, points out, not all school leaders have the fundraising skills required, or a building anyone wants to hire.
And let’s not forget that an entrepreneurial flair can get heads into serious trouble. Durand’s Sir Greg Martin opened a private health club on his school’s site that was said to be used to subsidise school lunches, evening childcare and free boarding.
Unfortunately, it also supplemented his headteacher salary to the tune of £161,000, which put him before the Public Accounts Committee and in the media spotlight. This was not helped by his other sideline run from the school address, a dating service called The Coterie, whose social media account featured pictures of a woman in black underwear.
Of course, he is an anomaly, but there are big questions around this headtreprenuerial activity, particularly the issue of whether it is serving to mask a fundamental and monumental problem.
Vic Goddard, head of Passmores Academy, believes schools have a duty to their pupils not to hide the strains they are under. Otherwise, he says, it’s letting the Department for Education off the hook. According to him, heads need to “be brave and put in the deficit budgets that are the reality of the situation”.
Of course, Goddard and everyone knows that’s really difficult to do. It does not come naturally to a head, whose obligation is always to ensure that children currently in their care get the best education they can give them. But Goddard is right: it’s not only about today’s pupils; it’s about tomorrow’s ones, too.
It’s a tough decision. But whatever heads decide, if they get the DfE unfairly pointing to those schools raising lots of cash and saying: they’re doing it, why can’t you, they should point right back and say the Department of Health did it, why didn’t you?
@AnnMroz
