School Funding - a slow-motion car crash

The school funding crisis has been years in the making and now it's here - and the effects will be felt - and complained about - for many years to come. The initial intention was always good - to make school funding fairer, to avoid the post-code lottery - but as they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Simplifying more than a bit, the underlying problem is that way, way back, local authorities were responsible for funding schools directly, and they did so with varying degrees of generosity. Then, not quite so far back, we had the ‘Local Management of Schools' and local authorities had to create a local formula for distributing the same amount of money - generous or otherwise - to their schools. Not surprisingly, they all worked out more-or-less complicated formulae that more-or-less replicated the funding that had been given before the new arrangements. They did this simply to avoid the spectre of ‘winners and losers' and the political difficulties that went alongside that. So, schools saw stability in funding.

Moving forward yet again, the Labour government centralised school funding but, as local authorities had already done, ducked the question of fairness and simply replicated existing levels of funding at local authority level, which led, essentially, to no change. At this time education budgets were growing in real terms, so it would have been relatively easy and painless to apply differential budget growth to those least-well-funded local authorities - and to require local authorities to do the same for schools - but the issue was parked somewhere in the long grass.

For the last seven years, there has been a shift in thinking, largely because of the academies programme. Whether the academies programme is right or wrong, it is clearly nonsensical to tie a present-day academy's funding to the arbitrary level set both by the local authority through its local formula and the government setting the overall schools' budget at local authority level.

Civil servants have been struggling to come up with a fairer formula for all schools. By and large, they have done a reasonable job. The underlying problems, though, have not gone away - however fair the new system, there will be major winners and losers, simply because the existing system is palpably not fair. The person to blame is, I'm afraid, the usual culprit, Michael Gove, who didn't have the sense to listen to his officials, thinking that all you needed was to make the system fair, and everybody would be happy!

The government has now got itself into a three-pronged problem from which there is no easy - or indeed, I fear, any - escape:

First, the losers will complain loudly, unceasingly and vociferously, as is always the case.

Second, because the government has spotted the first problem, they are introducing the changes over a period of years, which will lengthen the painful process for the losers, who will be complaining year-on-year right through to the next General Election, while the winners will also be complaining loudly as they won't have the increases to which they believe themselves entitled, using the government's own figures.

Third, and most damagingly, a change in formula is one thing - but at the same time there are real term cuts in the overall schools' budget as a consequence in changes in pay, NI and superannuation, which will increase all schools' costs.

So, we have the unhappy position - not win, win but lose, lose, lose - where some schools will see an increase over time that will be wiped out by cost increases - they will be unhappy - and other schools will see a decrease in budget over time that will be exacerbated by cost increases - and they will be apoplectic and have to reduce staffing costs hugely.

Remember that the National Union of Teachers/Child Poverty Action Group research shows that schools with poorer pupils will face the biggest cuts. And that the government has already been caught out doing special deals on adult social care. And don't forget the row about spending on grammar schools. It will all get tangled together.

One last point - even if the Prime Minister intervenes as she did with the Chancellor's Budget, and forces abandonment of the changes - schools will still experience the cut in their budgets.

As I said at the start, schools funding is a slow-motion car crash that will play out over the next three years - right up to, and beyond, the next General Election.

I can't say what the Labour Party would do about all this, because I haven't the foggiest idea, though it seems an academic question at present. 

Having got themselves into this pickle, I must admit that I don't see any easy way out for the government. Sorry!