School leaders in England are having to double up as caretakers and lollipop men and women as funding “hits rock bottom”, teaching unions have said.
Others are having to call on relatives to help fix crumbling buildings and do other odd jobs after years of “inadequate” funding for schools, they said.
Seven in 10 schools are struggling with real-terms cuts to their budgets since 2010 – 1,200 more than last year – according to the Stop School Cuts coalition, which has been monitoring school funding levels for almost a decade.
Research by the coalition, which is made up of three education unions, school governors and a parents’ charity, found more than 1,000 schools had suffered cumulative real-terms cuts in excess of £1m each, with Essex, Birmingham and Kent among the hardest hit areas.
Despite “some welcome funding this year”, the Labour government has failed to reverse a historic decline in spending as a proportion of GDP at a time when schools are struggling to deal with the rising cost of maintaining crumbling buildings, special educational needs, staffing, and food and energy costs, the coalition said.
Chris Ashley-Jones, the executive headteacher of Hitherfield primary school in south London, is having to double up as a lollipop man because he has insufficient support staff to fill the role. He has also just taken on the role of designated safeguarding lead.
“This year things have got as bad as I’ve seen in my nearly 20 years of headship,” he said. “Across schools in Lambeth I’m seeing exhausted staff, morale is low and we are seeing more and more dilapidated school buildings across the borough.
“In my school we have had to cut pretty much all areas of support staff and services, from additional language to mental health. We are relying on our parent-teacher association for reading books, playground equipment and more.”
Chris Ashley-Jones. Photograph: Andy Hall/The Observer
Claire Wilson, the head of Wood End infant and preschool in Milton Keynes, said: “After more than a decade of cuts, further savings are getting impossible to find. I had already cut spending to the bare bones.”
In the absence of a caretaker, the school business manager has been putting out the bins. “Our entire capital budget is just £4,500 which has to cover all building repairs, ICT and health and safety, it’s laughable,” Wilson said. “We’ve had to have relatives of staff come in to do odd jobs for us, like repairing a collapsed shed in the play area.”
The general secretary of the National Education Union, Daniel Kebede, said: “Funding for English schools has hit rock bottom. The result is overstretched school staff, crumbling buildings and harm to our children’s education, with some of the largest class sizes in Europe. We are urging the government to decisively deal with the school funding crisis once and for all and properly fund our children’s schooling.”
The general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, Paul Whiteman, said members were being asked to do more with less, including growing demand for special educational needs support. “School leaders share the government’s ambition for inclusion, but are warning that system reform must be accompanied with sufficient funding,” he said.
The Department for Education has been contacted for comment.
