Winter is coming and so too is an unprecedented crisis in school funding. Of course, we have been here before, and were the government capable of heeding the warning cries of school leaders following 12 years of cuts, you would expect a plan for the way forward. But this would assume Westminster isn’t hellbent on proving its disdain for the entire teaching profession, or undermining our role in educating the nation’s children.
I defy anyone to reach an alternative conclusion in the face of government plans to award England’s teachers a 5% pay rise, with no new funding streams to enable this. Instead, schools themselves, we are told, will scrape the funds together. You’ll have to forgive school leaders for explaining the obvious, but without extra funds to pay for the government’s last-minute wage increase, and with record rises in energy bills that could see some schools paying 500% more for their gas and electricity, schools are being asked the impossible.
