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.
Adding insult to injury, this announcement was sprung on headteachers the day before schools closed their gates for the summer holidays, leaving them buried in spreadsheets, searching for ways to make their budgets stretch beyond capacity. After more than a decade of austerity, the Department for Education is all but asking us to squeeze water from a stone, and our children will pay the price.
Schools already facing unprecedented strain are being forced to further tighten their belts, shelving maintenance work, contemplating redundancies and the axing of enrichment activities such as free music lessons and trips to make ends meet.
Ask any teacher, and most will have a story to tell of pupils leaving their neighbourhood for the first time to explore previously unknown parts of the country’s geographical or cultural landscape. As a child growing up in Bradford, it was on a school trip that I was able to see the huge, curved limestone amphitheatre of Malham Cove in North Yorkshire – just an hour away from home – for the first time. More than 30 years on, facts about sediment and rock formations have long been forgotten. But what has stayed with me is the spark of curiosity ignited on that trip. It led me to walk eagerly along with my peers, awed by the nature around me that I had never before experienced, far away from my neighbourhood of packed back-to-back houses. Up until then, I hadn’t known what my teachers meant when, in lessons, they referred to the Yorkshire Dales national park. Nearly 30 years on, and despite now living in London, I continue to visit the Dales each year.
Schools are struggling to bridge a widening attainment gap between disadvantaged pupils and their peers, which is currently at a 10-year-high. Enrichment activities are a big part of this picture – studies have shown the positive impact of school trips on vulnerable pupils and those considered most likely to underachieve. From encouraging a sense of adventure, to team-building and greater subject knowledge, school trips provide young people with transformational experiences that support personal development. Despite all this, schools have to make cuts, and in doing so will inevitably jeopardise some of the core aims of the teaching profession: to make education a rich tapestry of experiences.
In last autumn’s budget, then-chancellor Rishi Sunak acknowledged the “significant disruption” caused by the pandemic to children’s learning. As a result, the government vowed to restore per pupil funding to 2010 levels. But this August, the Institute for Fiscal Studies exposed the government’s giving with one hand while taking with another, and confirmed that it would not meet its own target, so the squeeze continues. Coupled with the cost of living crisis, it serves to hamper schools’ ability to promote a more equal education experience for all children.
Our new prime minister pitched herself as the “education candidate”, only to appoint an education secretary, Kit Malthouse, with no history of making a single statement on education or childcare before his promotion. From this, we may deduce that the picture under Liz Truss will remain just as hopeless.
In such stark times, the temptation may be to question the real educational value of days out. Given the choice to lay off staff or fund school trips, some may argue that heads should diminish the importance of enrichment activities even if they do broaden pupils’ knowledge and experience: if it can be cut then it isn’t a necessity. But all we cultivate with this style of thinking is a race to the bottom, and a fundamental ignorance of the question we should be asking. Where children’s education is concerned, why should we accept a progressive lowering of standards?
Lola Okolosie is an English teacher and writer focusing on race, politics, education and feminism
