Strong and stable? Try telling that to suffering teachers and schoolchildren

Smile that speaks louder than words

OUR school’s broken,” a boy at Forest Hill School in Lewisham told his teacher last week. “Nobody cares about us.” That second part isn’t quite true: his teachers care so much they’ve gone on strike. Tuesday was the ninth day in this academic year that staff have walked out over budget cuts, with further action planned for next week.

Although the teachers’ protest descended on Downing Street, it was never going to get the headlines of yesterday’s “Day of Rage” (more accurately: “120 minutes of meh”). Pedagogues on a picket line perhaps seem insignificant when our country is being turned upside down. And yet Forest Hill could prove a foreshock before a coming quake.

The school faces a £1.3 million deficit, blamed on past financial mismanagement and national funding cuts. Striking staff want the school to use its contingency fund but they’re also calling on the Government to fund education adequately. Instead, staff are being laid off to save cash. There will no longer be specialists to teach subjects such as personal, social and health education (PSHE) or citizenship. Admin and support posts have already been axed, and 15 teaching staff will go in September (some others have already found jobs elsewhere or taken early retirement). Yet the school still managed to fork out for agency staff to cover lessons.

Fewer staff means a ballooning workload for those who remain. As one teacher puts it: “There’ll be no time for pastoral care for our pupils, let alone to mark their work or plan engaging lessons.” The boys will suffer. Staff allege that they’ve already seen an increase in truancy and violence, and point out that for some children the school is the only place they get security and routine.

Why should children pay the price for mistakes made by their school’s former bosses? Many of the staff who’ve been deemed expendable are teaching assistants who support students with autism, dyslexia, ADHD and behavioural prob- lems. So the children with the trickiest educational paths to traverse have had their guides taken away.

Forest Hill School is the canary of the classroom. More than half of the nation’s schools overspent last year. Austerity is biting, with classes growing, after-school clubs getting axed and parents increasingly being asked to donate. MPs from all parties say funding for schools kept coming up on the doorstep and that it was a factor in the Tories haemorrhaging support from the middle-aged at the general election — a parental revolt.

The Government says on repeat — the “strong and stable” of education policy — that a record sum is being MAHERSHALA Ali, celluloid’s Captain Charisma, sent Twitter into a swoon yesterday. His smile — glorious in a covershoot for GQ — was likened to the eighth wonder of the world, hailed as a cure for depression and deemed proof of God’s existence. It spreads the same joy as that photo of Justin Trudeau with the baby pandas — only Ali doesn’t even need baby pandas. In internet parlance: find someone who looks at you the way Ali looks at the world.

The juxtaposition of the photos and interview is poignant, though. Ali talks about how, as a tall black man, he feels he has to shrink himself to make others feel safer. How police officers still demand to see his ID. He explains what it feels like to go from “being followed in Barneys to being fawned over”.

He could be emitting a howl of despair but Ali comes across as judicious and thoughtful. It is an unintentional masterclass in how to persuade: not preaching to the converted but encouraging the dismissive to recognise a problem. An argument is often conveyed best not with anger but with a smile. And what a smile. spent on schools. It isn’t the total that matters, though. Inflation nibbles away at that sum and there are demographic pressures too. The number of school-age children is rising, while spend per student is falling. A website created by the unions, The School Cuts, even tells you how much each school in a postcode is having its budget per pupil cut by.

Before the election, the Institute for Fiscal Studies analysed the manifestos and calculated that school funding would decline by three per cent in real terms by 2021 under the Conservatives’ watch. Yesterday ’s homeopathic Queen’s Speech offered little hope of any change there — in fact, plans to axe free lunches for infants and use those savings to top-up budgets were ditched.

These cuts are a false economy. What happened to investing in the future? Instead, headteachers will be pulled in two directions — pressurised to cut their wage bills, yet also desperate to keep up grades. A growing number of schools will overspend. Demoralised staff will quit. Schools will become frayed around the edges.

Forest Hill School’s teachers don’t want to strike but they fear none of their concerns will be addressed if they capitulate. They warn of “pandemonium” come September with what they consider a skeleton staff. Is this the country we want, one where teachers feel forced to take to the streets to get children the education they deserve?

@RosamundUrwin