Full marks for school cuts scaremongering
A £15m development grant. MORE teachers. A whopping pay rise to £125,000 – yet this head said she had to clean her school’s loos because of ‘Tory cuts’. As this damning exposé reveals, it’s just another case of a Left-wing principal scoring...
ASoBERING picture of ‘austerity Britain’ was recently painted by head-teacher Siobhan Lowe on Radio 4’s flagship Today programme.
Interviewed in the hallowed tone usually reserved for victims of serious crime or natural disasters, she was invited to tell the nation how so-called ‘Tory cuts’ are ravaging schools.
Ms Lowe, the headmistress of a large girls’ secondary in Surbiton, South-West London, claimed that her school is so impoverished that she’s had to mop the toilets and clean and serve in the canteen. Staff numbers have been cut, she further claimed, saying she’d been forced to employ ‘reduced numbers of teaching assistants’ and ‘ can no longer afford to have a deputy head’.
Listeners were further told that budgets are being slashed to the point where she’d ‘worked out that every student, per year, gets £10 per head, per year, to buy the basic equipment they need, such as books’.
Angrily, Ms Lowe explained: ‘My girls are looking at me, and they’re feeling so sorry for me that they’re picking up the Hoover and doing it for me, with me. I’ve cleaned doors. I’ve served in the school canteen… it’s just a phenomenal amount of cuts in schools on an everyday basis.’
A depressing testimony. Indeed, school ‘cuts’ duly became Radio 4’s lead news item that morning, with listeners told that head teachers believe we are facing a ‘funding crisis’.
All of which was, naturally, music to the ears of the Labour Party, whose education spokesman Angela Rayner was invited into the studio to discuss Ms Lowe’s interview.
‘It’s really devastating,’ the shadow minister declared. ‘I congratulate your radio programme this morning for having this as their item.’
Rayner seized upon Ms Lowe’s claims as evidence that ‘ the Tories have slashed school budgets for the first time in a generation’. ‘There will now be a generation of children paying the price for austerity,’ she wailed.
HERcomments were followed by those of fellow Labour MP Jess Phillips, who warned about debilitating cuts to school budgets. The MP for Birmingham Yardley was so furious that ‘the Government has failed in [its] most basic job’ that she encouraged parents to take their children to protest at the Department for Education.
Unsurprisingly, a number of Left-leaning news outlets gushed over this heart-rending tale of a headmistress forced, by swingeing cuts, to mop her toilets was spread across the land.
The most striking report appeared in The Times newspaper this week: a two-page interview with Ms Lowe in which she said she’d ‘lost dozens of staff through natural wastage and redundancies’.
The report explained: ‘The list of subjects Ms Lowe can’t afford to offer includes information technology, design and technology, and music.’ The story was headlined ‘The head who also cleans the school loos’ and was accompanied by a photo of Ms Lowe in a classroom of pupils.
Yet the picture showed them in what seemed to be a wellequipped design and technology workshop. How did that fit with Ms Lowe’s claim that her school is too poor to offer design and technology on its curriculum? This apparent discrepancy leads to a much wider issue of how socalled ‘ Tory cuts’ are being weaponised by opponents of the Government.
As for Ms Lowe’s Tolworth Girls’ School, its student handbook states that it offers not just Design Technology (to A and AS levels) but also the other two subjects cited in the newspaper article: IT (to BTEC level 3), and Music (to A and AS level).
Meanwhile, the true state of the school’s finances is set out in paperwork that the school is required to file at Companies House.
They suggest a very different state of affairs to the one presented by Siobhan Lowe.
The financial statements reveal that the head-teacher herself received an inflationbusting pay rise of between £10,000 and £20,000 last year. Her annual package rose to between £125,000 and £130,000, plus another £15,000-£20,000 in pension contributions. The previous year, it was between £110,000 and £115,000. Cash-strapped indeed! Meanwhile, despite Ms Lowe saying she’s had to mop toilets because she can’t afford to employ cleaners, the school’s annual cleaning budget rose from £30,000 to £57,000. When these facts were reported this week, Ms Lowe said she’d been given her bumper pay-rise because ‘the pupil population of the school has increased significantly’.
That, however, is not exactly true. The number of pupils has declined significantly in recent years, from 1,350 when it underwent an ofsted inspection in 2012, to 1,262 when inspectors last visited in 2017. Its last financial statements, filed this month, state that there are 1,264 children on the roll. So what’s going on? I have reviewed all the school’s financial reports dating back to 2012, when it moved out of local authority control to become an academy, which has means it has to file records with Companies House.
Siobhan Lowe has been headmistress throughout that period.
The records shed more detail on her pay. In 2012, her salary is recorded as between £95,001 and £100,000. Considering that it is now between £125,000 and £130,000, that means in six years it’s risen by between 25 and 40 per cent.
Then there’s the issue of staffing levels. The school has not lost ‘dozens’ of teachers, as the head said. In fact, the number of employees on the payroll remained constant between 2012 and 2017, at roughly 130. And last year, it
rose, to 150, with seven new teachers, nine ‘administration and support’ workers and two new members of ‘management’.
Remember: these additions came when the number of pupils decreased. In other words, they now have more teachers per pupil than before.
NOTall Ms Lowe’s staff enjoyed a pay rise like hers. In fact, Tolworth’s total salary bill fell in the past year from £ 4,522,000 to £4,512,000. What about Ms Lowe’s claim that she only has £10 per student to buy ‘basic equipment’ such as books?
The school’s accounts say that last year it spent £155,000 on ‘educational supplies’ — which surely include books — up from £137,000 the year before. That equates to £122 per student, more than a dozen times the figure Ms Lowe told the BBC. Also, the school has recently benefited from a £15million ‘educational redevelopment’.
According to its architects, the building project (which finished last summer) involved creating ‘ an attractive, bespoke sixthform centre including study areas, social space and a stunning balcony area with far reaching views’.
This supposedly cash- strapped school has an ‘attractive new pupil entrance, flexible performing arts theatre/lecture space with retractable seating for 250 people, performing arts teaching space, dance studio, music classrooms, music recording studio, ensemble rooms and practice rooms, library, media studies suite, 12 English classrooms, faculty resource bases and an enlarged inclusion department’.
Girls also enjoy the use of a ‘new high- specification floodlit multiuse games area’. Despite the headteacher’s claims about having to mop the toilets, these new buildings are so large that (having doubled its cleaning budget last year) the school is currently hiring two extra cleaners.
The recruitment advertisement says the jobs come with pensions and holiday pay, adding: ‘The academy has seen huge investment over the last few years.’
Siobhan Lowe isn’t the only headteacher moaning about ‘cuts’. Of course it is true that some schools are feeling the squeeze, with parents increasingly asked to contribute financially so their children get extra facilities and activities. There are also stories of schools forced to close at 1pm on Fridays.
But the fact is that Left-wing politicians are exploiting this in an irresponsible manner.
There is a nationwide campaign, orchestrated by Labour, the unions and Left-wing teachers to convince the public that schools are facing unprecedented cuts.
This agenda is being cheer-led by an organisation called WorthLess? which counts around 7,000 head teachers as members. Supporters have been lobbying the Government for more cash and have marched on Downing Street.
As evidence for their claim that government spending on education is falling dramatically, members (including Tolworth’s Siobhan Lowe) cite a report by the IFS think-tank last July which concluded that spending on schools had fallen by 8 per cent, per pupil, since 2010, when the Tory-led coalition government won power. That’s the equivalent of 1 per cent a year.
It’s a headline-grabbing claim, but also a highly controversial one which critics argue tells just half the story.
After all, the same IFS report also concluded: ‘Primary and secondary school spending per pupil has almost doubled in real terms between 1997–98 and 2015–16,’ meaning that in a historic context, school budgets are close to their highest ever levels.
The IFS report added that overall school budgets had been ‘protected in real terms since spending cuts took effect in 2010,’ and ring-fenced from wider ‘austerity’ cuts. However, the overall number of pupils whose education those budgets must fund has risen slightly.
Ministers accept that this trend, caused by immigration and other demographic factors, has caused a decline in per-pupil funding. Yet they argue it’s comparatively small and have promised to increase that funding in line with (or at above the rate of) inflation in the coming years.
‘The reality is schools today are better funded than they have virtually ever been,’ says Will Tanner, of the Centre-Right think-tank Onward. ‘Head teachers on taxpayer-funded salaries that are four times the average British wage should be careful about whipping up fake claims of funding cuts. Parents will not thank them for pursuing such a misleading political agenda.’
All of which brings us back to the WorthLess? campaign. Its founder, Jules White, is the head of anbridge House School in Horsham, West Sussex. As a local education authority-funded school, it does not have to publish accounts but it doesn’t seem to be on its uppers, having recently benefited from a £5.75 million redevelopment.
The school’s prospectus states: ‘We are fortunate to have wonderful cutting-edge facilities set on a beautiful and spacious school site which includes two new buildings to house Inclusion, Media & English, and Science & Geography.’
Another WorthLess? supporter is Stuart Pywell, head of St Stephen’s Junior School in Canterbury, Kent, quoted on BBC Radio this week.
He recently told parents that the school faces ‘ cuts’ and the most disadvantaged pupils would ‘bear the brunt’ of the Government’s alleged austerity measures.
However, he didn’t mention that his own salary jumped by between £5,000 and £15,000 last year to the band of £115,000-£120,000. In addition, the number of school staff rose from 96 to 99.
No mention, either, of the fact that Pywell’s wife was paid £2,400 for Human Resources consultancy services during the year under a deal approved ‘under normal commercial terms’. Pywell, a director of his wife’s firm, did not respond to a request for comment.
Another key figure in the WorthLess? campaign is Sally Lees, chair of the Kent Association of Headteachers, who has urged members to demonstrate at Downing Street against ‘ cuts’. Last year, her pay went up from between £110,000 and £115,000 to between £120,000 and £125,000, plus £ 15,000 to £ 20,000 in pension contributions.
TENTERDENSchools Trust, which runs her school, Homewood, and two others, added 31 teachers to its payroll over the same period. Hardly evidence of massive financial pressures.
Another campaigning outfit is the website School Cuts. It’s run by teaching unions and was developed by a tech company called Outlandish which is based in Jeremy Corbyn’s Islington constituency and which he visited last year.
It has boasted of success in making Tory MPs lose their seats in the last election, claiming that ‘91 per cent of schools face funding cuts’.
However, information on its website is, at best, controversial.
In January, the UK Statistics Authority said some of its claims were ‘ misleading’ and that they were creating a ‘worse picture’ of school funding than the reality.
The website says that Tolworth School has an income of £5.3 million. According to the school’s accounts, it is £6.6 million.
Challenged about this discrepancy, a spokesman said the School Cuts website doesn’t include a number of major income sources when calculating a school’s budget. Some might wonder if this makes it fit for purpose.
As for Tolworth’s head-teacher Siobhan Lowe, she did not answer a series of questions about her pay rise, her school’s finances or how the recent £15 million ‘educational redevelopment’ plan fits with the ‘ cuts’ she’s spoken about so publicly. Her silence doesn’t quite fit with her school’s motto —
‘Sic Luceat Lux’ (‘Let your light so shine.’)