Playground cash fight
Families demand end to years of education cuts
PARENTS & pupils gathered in over 300 school playgrounds nationwide in a stand against Tory cuts that have left schools at breaking point.
Families in Brighton, the Midlands, Yorkshire and Cumbria had banners demanding years of austerity be reversed.
Save Our Schools, the parent group behind yesterday’s demos, said spending cuts of 8% per child since 2009 had led to buildings “crumbling”, teachers losing their jobs and subjects “vanishing”.
Meanwhile, 250 schools have had to start closing early on Fridays in a bid to make their budgets stretch. The group said a funding boost of £7.1billion by 2022-23, announced by Prime Minister Boris Johnson, would not even restore funding to 2010 levels.
Analysis by unions, including the NEU, shows over 80% of schools will have less cash per pupil in real terms in 2020 than in 2015. Brighton mum-of-two Nadia
Abdo, 42, protested at Hertford Infants, which her kids Ava, 5 and Aiden, 8, attend.
She said the “chronically underfunded” system was putting “children’s futures at risk”. Frasier Cox, 12, a secondary school pupil in the city who has Asperger syndrome, said he feared support staff vital to him would be axed.
He added: “The Government can’t play with our futures.” Mum-of-two Helen Collier, from Birmingham, called the cuts a “national disgrace”. And Clem Coady, head of Stoneraise School, Carlisle, said resources had been “decimated” and the PM’s cash pledge would be “too late for this generation”.