Must try harder - schools running at a deficit is an 'F' grade for entire educational funding system
The Ink Education Focus
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This is our monthly ‘Education focus’ edition which will normally appear on the second Thursday of every month. The first Thursday is ‘Business’, and the third Thursday of the month is ‘Heritage’, and the final Thursday is ‘Food & Drink’.
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Thinking of schools along business lines risks reducing children to same status as boxes of identical widgets
Recently-released figures suggest a number of Swindon schools ran at a financial deficit during the last period for which information is available. What this says about the state of state educational funding at a national level is concerning, but perhaps even more so is the fact that we have all somehow sleepwalked into accepting the idea of schools being run along stark business lines. Meanwhile, the number of children educated at home, in Swindon and elsewhere, has been increasing since lockdown.
By Barrie Hudson
Every so often, a set of figures emerges from some official body or other which not only startles but makes us realise that something, somewhere, went badly wrong - probably a long time ago and hitherto unnoticed or ignored by us.
So it is with a recent announcement by the Association of School and College Leaders, a professional organisation formerly known as the Secondary Heads Association.
According to the ASCL, a number of Swindon schools are among countless more throughout the country which ran at a financial deficit over the last academic year. The association says that schools are required to disclose details of their finances to the Department for Education, although not all of them do so, meaning only an incomplete picture is available.
Those incomplete figures - again according to the association - show that three of the 22 local authority-maintained schools in Swindon which did provide information were in a financial deficit in 2022-23 – up from one the year before.
Obviously, the fact that only a limited number of schools - roughly a quarter - provided information puts certain parameters on the overall significance of the data; it would certainly be dangerous and unfair to attempt to use that data to paint a picture of the entire borough, for example.
A school is classified as in a financial deficit when it spends more than it earned when factoring in the previous year's balance.
The association cites the data in its insistence that the current Government has failed to keep pace with the rising costs of education. However, older people with long memories are only too aware that Governments giving the education system the absolute minimum they can get away with is far from a novel phenomenon, and one which transcends party political boundaries. Generations of pupils have endured challenges ranging from textbook shortages to ceilings crumbling floorward, whether the occupant of 10 Downing Street was Wilson, Callaghan, Thatcher, Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss or the present incumbent.
Nationally, there has been a significant increase in the number of schools running at a deficit, with some 13.1 percent of local authority-run schools affected in 2022-23 – an almost 50 percent rise on the year before.
Julia Harnden, funding specialist at the ASCL, said many schools must operate in-year deficits while identifying longer term savings because of stalling investment in education.
She added: "While schools endeavour to do this without detriment to pupils, this inevitably impacts on provision, such as pastoral support, curriculum options and routine building maintenance.
"Despite the Prime Minister’s promise that his main funding priority in every spending review will be education, schools and colleges received barely a mention in the autumn statement.
"This must be rectified in the spring budget to turn rhetoric into reality."