Cutting the education budget?

By Jim Sweetman / @Jimbo9848

There are around 17,000 primary schools in the UK and 3,000 secondary schools. 8 million children are in full-time education and another 3 million adults are in colleges and universities. These are big numbers but none of them can easily be cut. So, exactly where would an incoming Conservative government find its promised 20% of economies?

Early years provision would be guaranteed to take a hit if there was a change of government. It is mostly non-statutory so it can easily be returned to the private sector. The private nurseries and preparatory schools that take children from two or three years old have had a couple of lean years as children’s centres, increased nursery funding and the availability of state nurseries have all increased. The private proprietors would be smiling if the Conservatives came to power. Labour is much clearer that social change is driven by early years education and it will remain a priority. It makes good electoral sense as well to keep the schoolgate community on your side.

It is a familiar tune but there is always an assumption that central spending can be reduced. In 2005, the Conservative Party committed itself to close down the National College for School Leadership. When it was pointed out that the college provided the only essential qualification for new headteachers, the party offered to scrap that as well. Now, the college also has responsibility for children’s services and the development of leadership in an area where recent reports have shown that it is significantly lacking. Anything that looks like a reduction in the resourcing of children’s services will be unpopular given their much-publicised weaknesses. More likely with any new government, is some attempt to sort out the overlapping functions of what is now called the National College and the Teacher Development Agency (TDA) which has just made an expensive move to Manchester.

In an attempt to illustrate the profligacy of Ed Balls, another Conservative target will be the DCSF, but this is a leaner organisation than it once was. It also outsources more so that cutting the departmental budget will cut the flow of money to the big private educational contractors. Publicly, David Cameron has hinted that companies like Capita and Serco will have to fight harder for contracts but the companies themselves reckon that cost-cutting at the centre can only be good for them.

Another quango, The Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency, QCDA, is on difficult ground whoever wins the election. Some of its functions have transferred to the new regulatory authority, Ofqual, and it has few friends in government after the problems caused by key stage SAT testing in the last few years. However, in terms of the national education budget as a whole, these kinds of cuts and mergers are small beer and that leaves schools themselves in the firing line.

The Conservative Party has a delicate balancing act to perform here. On the one hand, it says it wants to see schools improved because they must have got worse under Labour but, on the other, it does not want to invest more in them. The Conservatives have to juggle two constituencies: one of them, the older and greyer one, never goes near schools, hears only bad news in the media and sees teenagers looking bigger than they used to be and noisier; the other group has children in schools and knows that their children’s schools are cleaner and better resourced than they once were but has a hankering for the notion that the private sector might do it all better. The garbled and contradictory policies on teacher standards and qualifications, the role of the academies and on who can set up and run schools are the result of trying to deliver several different messages to varied audiences.

The preferred solution is worrying. It is simply to place the burden on schools. By talking a lot about giving headteachers chequebooks and control over their own budgets it is easy to slip in a financial cutback as part of the deal. The problem with that approach is that it instantly hits the frontline. That means fewer support staff – easier to lose than teachers – and fewer books and computers. It means an instant reversal. Everyone knows that there are going to have to be cutbacks in education but devolving these intelligently from the centre can undoubtedly minimise impacts.

The other way in which giving money direct to schools can be presented as an economy is that schools can then be expected to buy in services from the local authority. There is still some hankering in the prosperous end of maintained education for the direct grant schools of the 1990s which ran, allegedly, so efficiently without local authority intervention. The truth of course is that they ran efficiently because they were already good schools with clever children and supportive parents which suddenly had money poured into them to make the policy work. The Every Child Matters agenda makes it harder to drive a wedge between local authorities and schools today but there will undoubtedly be efforts to do just that.

At its heart, the Conservative Party does not value wider access to education as a force for good. It remains patrician and meritocratic and distrusts teachers also as much as local authorities. It hasn’t given up on vouchers either and its policies on education remain confused. If there are going to be cutbacks in education, you wouldn’t choose Michael Gove to administer them.