Schools struggling with budget cuts
WITH the government cutting school funds by a gobsmacking £3 billion, secondary schools are struggling to survive after getting into debt.
Many devastated headteachers were warned about the apparent cuts but soon realised it would be a struggle to tackle running a school and keeping to the budgets available.
Russell Hobby, National Association of Headteachers general secretary, said: ‘School budgets are being pushed even closer to breaking point than before. Schools are acutely feeling the impact of an estimated £3 billion shortfall in the government’s education budget by 2020 – the first real-terms cuts to education spending since the 1990s.’
With a third of English secondary schools in the red, an average annual loss has risen whilst spending per pupil has been estimated to have effectively fallen by 6.5
per cent.
Head of a secondary school in West Sussex and a founder of the WorthLess Campaign for fairer funding, Jules White, said: ‘Time and time again, independent analysts are confirming what every headteacher in the country knows; schools are sliding furtherandfurtherinto debt, regardless of whether they are local authority or academy controlled.’
Desperate measures have to be made to help the cuts of school funding seem less daunting. Due to the lack of funds, schools all over the UK have had to cut back on hours for teaching assistants, asking the students’ parents to help with tidying up and maintaining the school and even cut the amount of school trips available to students in order to cope with the cuts. Teachers have had to buy their own resources and printed their own documents at home in order to save money.
One secondary school teacher explained how bad the conditions were due to the school funding cuts.
He said: ‘We have had departmental budgets cut by 50 per cent. I have been asked to only photocopy the most necessary of items such as exam papers. I do not ask for pens or paper as I know there is no money. I just buy them myself. I buy my sixth formers dividers and folders, I bought my own lamination equipment and my own guillotine. The cuts are stopping the students from learning. In a time when we should be looking to develop engaging lessons which teach students valuable life skills, I am using 20-year-old textbooks and the kids are copying information from it. It is depressing. Eventually this will encourage me to leave.’
The pressure to keep a school alive and full of students is getting worse, and headteachers all over Britain wonder when they will be able to not have to reduce equipment provided for the students and when they will be able to give the students modern technology and the best learning environment.
MOBILE phones in schools are a hot topic for debate but should people be allowed to use them in schools? Some say that they should be banned whilst others maysaytheycanbean educational resource if used correctly.
A reason for people saying that they should not be banned is that kids may need them to look things up using the internet in class to help them. This would be useful because then the teacher doesnothavetospendtime looking things up for the child and taking time away from helping other people.
However, it might not be a good thing to have mobile phones in schools because they could be considered a distraction from learning.