Earlier this week, Kenneth Baker, Justine Greening, and Robert Halfon urged our next Prime Minister to address rising cost pressures for schools. With the start of the new academic year imminent, schools are facing the pressure of surging energy bills and inflation. Since schools aren’t covered by the cap in household energy bills, head teachers are warning of redundancies, bigger classes, and cuts to the curriculum if more money isn’t provided.
Baker, an Education Secretary under Margaret Thatcher, warned schools would ‘go into the red’ with government intervention. Greening – who did the same job under Theresa May – suggested that children were facing an “education double-hit”, of Covid-related disruption followed by budgets being swallowed by rising prices. And Halfon, the chair of the Commons Education Committee, argued for a Lyndon Johnson style “war on poverty”, and that previously-announced funding did not go far enough.
The three were right to point out the impact of inflation on the education budget. One of the many under-reported elements of Rishi Sunak’s Spring Statement – which, admittedly, feels like a lifetime ago – was his decision not to uprate public spending in line with inflation. Consequently, this will mean at least an extra £8.3 billion will be required this year and £17.8 billion next year to maintain current levels of public spending.
Without that money, budgets will shrink – and that means real-terms cuts in the money available to our public services. Being Conservatives, we are obviously fans of getting public spending under control, making the state more efficient, cutting borrowing, and enjoying motherhood and apple pie. But these spending cuts come before any that the next Prime Minister will have to make if debt interest, energy bill bailouts, and financing tax cuts means that the state’s borrowing costs are soaring.
The Department for Education was one of those ministries that had its budget ring-fenced during the Coalition years – and that was after the 78 per cent in spending education that occurred under Gordon Brown. Although spending per pupil has fluctuated between 2015 and today – with school budgets receiving an additional £4 billion this year – the nature of the current cost-of-living crisis means that teachers are facing the sort of squeeze on budgets that they have been crying wolf about for years.
So there is a case to be made for allocating more money to schools – especially if we’re magicking up (read, borrowing) tens of billions to spend more in everything from social care to building HS3. That is also before the Government faces teacher strikes across the autumn and winter. As a significant proportion of The Guardian’s readership, teachers are never quiet about demanding more cash. But inflation means incomes are genuinely squeezed, and pay rises justified.
All this before any more money is allocated for building grammar schools, or whatever other schemes Truss and Sunak have promised for a clap from a hustings audience. More importantly, in the short-term, it also comes before the Government has stumped up meaningful amounts for Covid catch-up programs. Boris Johnson’s education catch-up tsar Sir Kevan Collins resigned last year after the Government only provided £3 billion of the £15 billion he argued was needed to make up for the disruption of the last two years.
We can rant and rave ad infinitum about the problems with lockdown and the mistake to close schools. But we cannot ignore the impact that those lost months have had on children. Almost half of parents with children sitting GCSEs or A-Levels reported that schools provided no ‘remote learning’ in the first lockdown when exams were cancelled. I have written before about how grade inflation undermines standards. But missing school means long-term gaps in knowledge for many, and widening inequalities based on the support received.
So the case for giving more money to schools can be made based on several levels, whether on avoiding cuts, providing more help to those with budgets under pressure, or to further invest in tackling the problems caused by lockdowns and other forms of disruption. Unfortunately, for two key reasons, this money will not be coming anytime soon. And that is all before I go on another rant about how Trussonomics is pie-in-the-sky.
The first is that, when push comes to shove, the Conservative Party always puts its base of aging homeowners ahead of young people. Under Johnson, we saw a u-turn on an effort to build more houses, and the breaking of a manifesto commitment not to raise National Insurance in order finance a social care scheme that protected the rights of wealthy pensioners to keep their homes at the expense of young taxpayers. I love my grandparents, yes. But I do not love paying higher taxes.
More recently, the same Sunak who wouldn’t stump up for more money to help schools catch-up was more than happy to agree to protect the pensions Triple Lock. Truss did likewise. As such, with inflation remaining in double figures for the foreseeable future, we have the unprecedented situation where the average pensioner household has a higher income than the average working-age household, after hosing costs. The public finances creek under the unwillingness of the Tories to tell pensioners hard truths.
The other reason – asides from the broader economic mess we find ourselves in – why we cannot expect to see an increase in education spending any time soon is less depressing. Education spending is not directly linked to outcomes. New Labour doubled spending on education – and Britain plummeted down international league tables. Reforming the curriculum and structure matters fare more for results than ploughing in more money. Michael Gove did more good than Gordon Brown.
So, in some ways, forcing schools to economise through the pressures placed on squeezed headmasters is a good thing. Since 2000, the number of teaching assistants has more than tripled, with little discernible impact on results, and the Department of Education’s own analysis suggests that around £1.7 billion can made in staffing cuts can be made with no impact on results. Rather than paying teachers more, we should be paying fewer teachers.
But pushing for such measures would require having a government with a vision and commitment to reforming and improving education. Neither Sunak nor, more importantly, Truss have shown much interest in that in this campaign. Nor have they shown much concern than the pandemic has meant progress in closing the attainment gap between schools has been lost. Or that officials at the Department of Education are trying to snatch away the freedoms so recently given to academies, via the now-gutted Schools Bill.
A party that puts protecting wealthy pensioners and opposing building on the Green Belt ahead of future generations deserves to be polling in third place amongst the under 24s. The Tories have lost all interest in education. As schools cry out for both money and reform, the interests of candidates and members are elsewhere – and the opportunity to consolidate and extend the party’s major achievement in office will be wasted.