Primary and secondary schools in England are facing a budget shortfall of at least 1bn over the next three years, the National Union of Teachers warned last week.
The warning followed the publication of a school budgets study by PriceWaterhouseCoopers for the NUT that found a combination of increases in teachers' pay and in national insurance and pensions contributions, the cost of support staff and the implementation of the teacher workload agreement could push England's schools 1bn in the red. This is despite the Government's pledge of an additional 800m in funding - 400m a year over the next two years.
NUT general secretary Doug McAvoy described the 1bn figure as 'conservative' and said it was more likely to be around 1.5bn.
The PwC report looked in depth at 36 primary and secondary schools in six local authorities - Durham, Birmingham, Essex, Hammersmith and Fulham, Brighton and Hove, and Wiltshire - chosen to give a 'fair balance of types of authority facing different funding conditions', the NUT said. PwC said that due to the relatively small size of its sample, 'it is not possible to draw firm national level conclusions from the financial data collected from the authorities and schools visited during the course of this study'. But Mr McAvoy said the research was 'credible because of the nature of the sample'.
Mr McAvoy added that it was 'not just a tick-box study' but had involved 'long and rigorous interviews and in-depth discussions' with headteachers, LEA finance officers and Ofsted.
The report found that primary school costs looked set to rise at a faster rate than secondary school costs over the three-year period of the comprehensive spending review, and highlighted that the most costly element of the teacher workload agreement was yet to be implemented, namely the guaranteed 10 per cent preparation, planning and assessmenttime in 2005-06, which would require more teaching staff to be employed.
Mr McAvoy said, 'The Government must accept the size of the problem and have open discussions. We are asking the Government to accept that there is a problem that is bigger than it has admitted to date.'
A Department for Education and Skills spokesman said, 'The NUT appears to be asking for more money to implement a workforce reform agreement with which it disagrees and which it refuses to sign. Moreover, the evidence it cites is based on just 36 selected schools within only six LEAs and as such does not paint a representative national figure.'
He added that spending was up by nearly 800 per pupil since 1997 and would be up by more than 1,000 per pupil by 2005-06 and that the Government had set out a funding framework for the next two years 'to build confidence in the funding system and are putting in an extra 400m to reverse planned cuts in standard fund grant in each of the next two years'.
