Positive thinking

Janet Lord, Manchester Metropolitan University Recent changes to school funding in England mean that, although there may seem to be more money for education, in general schools will be worse off in 2021 than they have been over the last few years. In the second half of 2019, the government announced a £14 billion increase in funding for schools in England. This is over three years: £2.6 billion in 2020-21, increasing to £4.8 billion in 2021-22 and £7.1 billion in 2022-23. The National Education Union (NEU) analysed the figures , and despite the cash injection, found “a strong link between deprivation and the scale of government cuts to school funding”. The NEU suggests that, when inflation is taken into account, over 16,000 schools will have less income in April 2020, compared to 2015. Over the past decade, school spending per pupil in the UK has fallen by about 8% in real terms. According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies , this is the largest decline since at lea...

Mel Ainscow, University of Manchester and Maija Salokangas, Trinity College Dublin Academies are back in the news – and not for a good reason. In the same week that parents, children and teachers united in strike action against academy schools, new figures show that more than 64 of these schools are waiting for a new sponsor . These schools are unable to return to local authority control after being abandoned by, or stripped from, the trust that originally managing them. Department for Education figures obtained through a freedom of information request show that more than 40,000 children are being educated in these so-called “zombie schools”. This comes at a time when large pay rises for academy chiefs have been dubbed “unreasonable” by academies minister Lord Agnew. Trusts that are paying leaders more than £150,000 have been asked to explain their “rationale” to the Education and Skills Funding Agency. Academies were first introduced by the Labour government in ...