Can We Still Afford Glue Sticks?
This most humble of items is a great indicator of a school's prosperity, thinks Kevin Harcombe…
I see the exam boards have inadvertently leaked SATs questions again. Here’s one: how many teachers does it take to change a lightbulb? Answer: none – in the current economic climate, schools can’t afford lighting.
Yes, the freeze on schools’ budgets is sending a chill wind through staffrooms across the land (or is that just the draught from the broken windows?).
Of course, the ‘freeze’ is effectively a ‘cut’ after inflation, raised national insurance and pension contributions and the apprenticeship levy. In a recent newspaper report on dwindling school budgets, headteachers were rightly bemoaning forced redundancies of key staff, crumbling infrastructure, the inability to replace obsolete computers, and, particularly shocking this, one head is having to have ‘conversations with teachers about how to fund Pritt Sticks’, as though the lack of adhesive was alone leading to the terminal decline of educational standards.
In my school, the glue stick conversation would go something like this:
Teacher: Can I have some glue sticks, please?
Me: No. We’re skint. Bugger off and use PVA like your granny had to.
The lack of glue sticks is trivial – especially when compared to redundancies – but it is a touchstone of how poor schools are feeling. Glue sticks are an indicator of prosperity in schools. Their absence signals belt-tightening and austerity.
Glue sticks are the equivalent of sexy touchscreens – convenient, clean, time-saving; PVA adhesive (inconvenient, messy, two hours to unscrew the cap) is the equivalent of the dusty, dowdy blackboard.
The growing school funding crisis is very real but does not impact on the general public in the way that, for example, NHS funding crises do. That makes headlines because the effects are immediate and dramatic – seriously ill people on trollies for lack of beds, in corridors not wards.
We watch the news and empathise, ‘That could be my mum, or me!’ Footage of a teacher struggling to get the top off a bottle of PVA doesn’t have the same heart-rending impact and isn’t going to headline the ten o’clock news. Nor, unfortunately, are leaky roofs, antique computers and redundant TAs.
Education cuts take a generation to be news, because that is when they will impact; young adults ill-equipped for the world of work because they were taught in decrepit buildings with inadequate IT facilities and over-large classes without TA support. And worst of all, they never learnt how to use a glue stick. In the spirit of looking on the bright side, here are my ‘hard times’ tips for making do.
Can’t afford books? Walk the children to the local library instead – it’s useful exercise! And when they get their and find it’s turned into a tattoo parlour, hey presto, they can practise their reading on the salty slogans being etched onto a builder instead.
Are your computers and laptops 10 years old and unreliable? Simply don’t turn them on and save electricity instead! Struggling to raise money for roof repairs? Don’t bother – here’s that outdoor classroom you’ve always wanted!
Heating bills going through the roof? That’ll be because the roof is full of holes you can’t afford to repair. No parent counsellor? Due to all your TA redundancies, clapped out computers and appalling infrastructure, no families want to enrol anyway, so no more fussy parents and needy children draining time and money. Having trouble raising cash for fancy interactive whiteboards? Don’t bother – your teacher laptops are 10 years old, remember, and therefore incompatible!
At least it’s becoming clear now why the government put the stone age on the new curriculum – it’s practical preparation for working in 21st-century British schools. In fact, the schools best placed to weather the current economic squeeze will be those with much vaunted forest school training, who are effectively prepared to survive in the prehistoric conditions that schools are being consigned to.
These children and their teachers will have the skills to improvise shelters, make fire for warmth and skilfully navigate the wilderness as they forage for seeds, berries and Pritt Sticks.
Another question leak, this time from the SATs SPaG test. What is wrong with the following sentence?
Schools face an 8% reduction in real-term budgets by 2019-20 and this could lead to significant risks to educational outcomes.
Answer: everything.
Kevin Harcombe (@kevharcombe) is a Teaching Award winner and headteacher at Redlands Primary School, Fareham.
