Positive thinking

One freezing night of January 2019, 150 people packed into a church hall in the Hertfordshire town of Stevenage, some 30 miles north of London. Students, teachers, support staff, parents and grandparents had come to support their community’s secondary school against the Conservative government’s plan to hand control to a super-wealthy couple. A young man called Dylan Jones, the school’s “head student”, stood up to speak. “I have been part of the school since 2012,” he said. “It’s the best it’s ever been. It’s just a shame that those who have not had the same opportunity as me to see every student, every class, and those who have not seen us for the true community that we are, have decided that they can push us around because we do not have a voice.” In England today almost 9,000 schools with more than 4 million pupils operate outside of their democratically-accountable local authorities. These schools are state-funded but independent of local control. The charitable trusts that r...

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...