A less than capital idea

By Stephen Gummer

This week David Cameron declared to the House of Commons:

“…the amount of spending per pupil will continue, even though we have a very tough and difficult situation in our country.”

This statement could not be further from the truth. While revenue budgets for schools will be largely maintained and even partially supplemented by the pupil premium, the Conservative leader made no mention of the fact that he intends to cut the capital budget of every school in England by 60%.

At the current time school capital budgets can be held over by schools for 3 years. This allows schools to save up to buy big ticket items, such as installing a new fire alarm system or replacing the school windows or boiler. With such a radical cut to the capital budget it is hard to see how a school will ever be able to afford such essential items that guarantee the safety of children within school.

Should anything now go wrong within a school, the school will likely have to divert money from its revenue fund to the capital budget to subsidise the repairs. Contrary to the claims of Cameron and Gove this will divert money from pupils and teachers.

It is also worth stating that such a policy will likely hurt poorer schools hardest as they tend to be the schools that are housed in dilapidated and crumbling buildings. In effect the Tories have introduced a regressive budget cut to schools across Britain. They have safeguarded funding but only to Britain’s most affluent students in the most well-maintained schools.

In what is arguably one of the most important articles of last year, the Financial Times outlined that a large majority of children will lose out based on the pupil premium formula, which will only achieve greater revenue budgets in a minority of cases.

Further hardship will be created by the huge swathes of Conservative budget cuts to local authority services that were originally designed to help the most vulnerable children within the borough. Children’s Services across the country are expected to be slashed with cuts coming to YOTs, children’s social care, early years support, Sure Start, Connexions, Aiming High for Disabled Children and the Youth Crime Action Plans, as well as Child and Adoescent Mental Health Services. Without these services outside of school a teacher’s job will become more challenging. Teachers will be forced to deal with issues that had previously been resolved outside the classroom. They will have to do so with lesser budgets and lesser training than the professionals currently tasked to solve the problem in students’ early years.

Education matters a great deal to many and speaking honestly about the cuts that are to come is the only fair and progressive way to debate the future of children in this country.