‘Unprecedented’ cuts to schools’ per-pupil funding loom

Hackney NUT members on strike at BSix College in March last year. Photograph: Lucy Capes

Hackney schools could face an “unprecedented” 24 per cent cut in spending per pupil over the next five years, the borough’s largest teaching union has warned.

The warning by the Hackney Teachers’ Association (HTA), the local branch of the National Union of Teachers (NUT), follows George Osborne’s announcement in the November Spending Review that the national funding formula for schools is to be changed. The formula is used to calculate the money schools receive for each pupil on their roll.

Hackney schools currently receive £6,680 per pupil per year. Figures released by Labour’s candidate for London Mayor, Sadiq Kahn, suggest that this could fall by £2,060, meaning an overall reduction in yearly spending of £51 million for Hackney’s schools.

“As with so much else this government does, this will hurt our most disadvantaged students most,” an HTA statement claimed.

The HTA pointed out that schools would find it difficult to get round the possible cuts by taking on more students. “This is not an option for primary schools that have a class size limit of 30,” the HTA said. Meanwhile, cash-strapped secondary schools, without the necessary space “will have to install prefab classrooms in the playground rather than build proper school buildings.”

“This would be disastrous for education in Hackney,” said Dave Davies, a teacher at Stoke Newington School and joint divisional secretary at the HTA. “It would dwarf any previous attempts to cut education funding.

“London, and Hackney within that, but London as a whole, has been a success story over the last ten years when it comes to education.

“If you were to strip London out of the country as a whole and look at the PISA ratings, where education systems are often compared with Shanghai as one of the top ones, London would beat Shanghai on any measure.”

Davies added that London and Hackney’s success was down to high funding and initiatives like the London Challenge, where teachers and schools work together to share good practice.

“There’s all sorts of models and methods of trying to raise standards in education, but decent funding is at the heart of all of them,” he said. “London has invested money in the young people we teach, but also we have had a collaborative approach through the London Challenge over the last 15 years to drive up standards,” he said.

“The idea that that might be threatened by this cut in funding I think is very, very worrying.

“Of course, children around the country deserve equally high levels of investment, but it should be a process of levelling up rather than trying to level down,” he added.

The average per-pupil funding for local authorities in England is £4,551, with the lowest sums going to Cambridgeshire (£3,950), South Gloucestershire (£3,969) and Leicestershire (£3,995).

The new funding formula was welcomed by f40, a group campaigning for “Fairer Funding in Education”, which claims disparities in funding bear no relation to relative levels of deprivation across local authorities. The City of London receives the highest amount, at £8,595 per pupil.

The Department for Education (DfE), which will devise the new spending formula, said it was still a work in progress. “We have never said that what we are trying to do is bring everyone to the average,” a DfE spokesman said.

“We intend to consult and we will not know the impact of any changes on individual areas until we have completed that process.”