ASCL Warns Of Education Funding Crisis
The Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL) has warned that funding cuts are having a damaging effect on the education provided by secondary schools and colleges – and that the situation is set to become worse over the coming year. The warning comes in the wake of an ASCL survey carried out January this […]
The Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL) has warned that funding cuts are having a damaging effect on the education provided by secondary schools and colleges – and that the situation is set to become worse over the coming year.
The warning comes in the wake of an ASCL survey carried out January this year among 885 secondary leaders (in both academies and maintained schools). The findings included:
• 84.58% answering ‘no’ when asked, ‘Over the past 12 months have you received enough funding to meet the essential needs of your school/ college in terms of having sufficient resources to deliver high-quality education?’
• 38.8% stating that they had needed to make staff redundancies within the past 12 months. 80.35% said they had been unable replace members of support staff, 69.83% said that they had faced having to not replace teaching staff, while 46.24% said that they had needed to reduce their school’s number of senior leadership posts.
• 69% considering their school’s current financial situation to be ‘fine’; 28.25% thought it ‘Worrying, but coping at the moment’, 30.4% felt it ‘very serious’ and 17.63% believed it to be ‘critical’. (Just over a third of respondents thought their school’s financial situation would become critical over the next 12 months)
• 77.13% answering ‘Yes’ when specifically asked if financial pressures had had a detrimental effect on the education they were able to provide.
As the Association’s annual conference got underway today, ASCL President Allan Foulds referenced the issue of funding cuts in an address to conference delegates, commenting, “These problems are so acute that there is a serious danger we will not be able maintain current standards, let alone raise them further.
“The Government is rightly committed to raising standards. Nothing is more important to school and college leaders. But it is simply asking the impossible to demand that schools and colleges take the next big leap forward in raising the bar without providing the essential materials with which to achieve that ambition.”
In other ASCL-related news, it has teamed up with the think tank Policy Exchange to publish a series of essays containing ideas for tackling the ongoing issue of teacher recruitment and retention.
Among the suggestions is a proposal by Policy Exchange’s head of education, Jonathan Simons in the collection’s opening essay, ‘Let’s Talk About Flex’, that schools make greater use of flexible working practices.
As well as boosting the number of part-time roles and managing hours to suit family responsibilities, this could also take in on-site childcare provision for staff, ‘Keep in touch days’ for female teachers on maternity leave, opportunities for teaching staff to take sabbaticals and career breaks and cross-school employment/secondment initiatives.
Simons’ essay also highlights the issue of the ‘Pool of Inactive Teachers’. It notes that there are “231k inactive teachers who have left teaching, but only 85k of them are aged 45 and under and have taught in the last 13 years (which we use as a proxy for those most likely to return). There are a further 106k qualified teachers who have never taught in a state school, of whom 45k are aged under 45 and qualified within the last 13 years.
“Nevertheless, as an interim measure, increasing returner rates from this group could be a quick win.”
For more information, visit www.ascl.org.uk or follow @ascl_uk
