School protest banners removed during election
ACAMPAIGN group that hung banners outside Midland schools revealing budget cuts has condemned Birmingham City Council after they were told to take them down during the General Election campaign.
Save our Schools West Midlands has displayed banners at schools since the end of October, highlighting the scale of funding cuts since 2015.
The region’s schools have endured cuts of £556 million from 2015-2019, according to figures compiled by the National Education Union.
But the city council told head teachers to temporarily remove the banners, claiming they breached pre-election guidelines.
However, the group disputes the claim, citing Local Government Authority guidance on communications during ‘purdah’ which states: “You are allowed to: publish factual information to counteract misleading, controversial or extreme (for example, racist/sexist) information.”
Save our Schools argues that it was simply displaying factual information that is not party political.
Speaking ahead of Thursday’s election, campaign organiser and teacher, Kate Taylor, said it was more important now than ever to bring the figures to people’s attention.
“We have been running for about two years, and we basically are campaigning to highlight the problems in school funding that are affecting schools in Birmingham and the West Midlands, but also across the country,” she said.
“We initially hung the banners about a year-and-a-half ago, highlighting the cuts that schools were experiencing at the time, and they became outdated relatively quickly, as the cuts rose.
“The new round of banners were in reaction to the pledge for more funding from the Conservatives.
“And what we quickly realised with that pledge of £14 billion that came up in August was that, actually, it wasn’t going to be helping our schools, it wasn’t going to be helping many schools across the country, and any help that it was providing wasn’t going to be quick enough.
“We felt that the claims are misleading – that the government were saying ‘we’ve solved it, we’ve solved the funding crisis – it’s not a problem any more.’ And really we wanted to highlight how misleading that was for people.
“So what we put on the banners is the current loss that schools are experiencing now - the loss they have experienced between 2015 and 2019. And we just wanted to highlight the impact of that, really.”
A spokesperson for Birmingham City Council said that the advice was issued to the authority through the Local Government Act.