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Government Spends £12 Million on Jubilee Book While Schools Struggle to Afford Books
The news that the Government is spending millions on a book to commemorate the Queen’s platinum jubilee follows a 9% real terms education spending cut from 2010 to 2020
The Department for Education has announced a £12 million contract to provide four million children with a book about the Queen, raising questions about education spending priorities.
The commemorative book marks the Queen’s platinum jubilee. However, the spending comes at a time when school funding is under pressure, with schools in the most deprived areas of the country being hit hardest.
Catch-up funding promised to schools to help deal with the impact of the Coronavirus pandemic fell far short of the money that experts say was needed. The Government promised schools £1.4 billion over three years in addition to the £1.7 billion already announced. This equated to £50 extra per pupil per year.
In contrast, the Education Policy Institute suggested that £13.5 billion was required to help pupils catch up on lessons missed during the crisis.
Real Terms Cuts
While education spending increased during the 2000s, since 2009/10, school funding per pupil fell by 9% in England – equating to the largest cut in more than 40 years.
The Government plans to allocate an extra £7.1 billion to schools between 2019/20 and 2022/23, money which – while welcome – simply reverses the cuts made over the previous decade, meaning that school spending is equal now to what it was when Labour left power in 2010.
Since 2015, the average amount spent on a pupil has fallen from £5,000 to just under £4,700. To reverse this trend, schools need £2.4 billion a year.
Schools in the most deprived areas of England have been hit hardest by real terms cuts.
During the 2000s, the funding advantage per pupil in deprived regions increased from 25% in 2001 to 35% in 2010. The trend reversed over the next 10 years, so that by 2018/19, that funding had returned to 2000 levels. This was in spite of the introduction of the Pupil Premium in 2011.
The Pupil Premium is funding dedicated to improving education outcomes for disadvantaged pupils in England. However, changes to the way it was allocated in 2021 led to what school leaders called a ‘stealth cut’ of £90 million of funding for the poorest pupils.
This was because the Government decided to calculate the number of pupils eligible for the funding by basing it on the numbers of children receiving free school meals in October, not in January as had previously been the case.
The change meant that households which had fallen into poverty after October were cut out of the funding. The most recent data shows that 20.8% of pupils are eligible for free school meals, up from 17.3% in 2020.
Impact of the Cuts
The decade-long decrease in real terms school funding has led to larger classroom sizes, fewer teachers and staff having to fill in the gaps when it comes to equipment and books.
England’s primary school children are now taught in the largest classes since 2000, while in secondary schools the number of children taught in classes with more than 30 pupils is at its highest since 1981.
As the cuts hit hard, schools even reported closing early on Fridays to save money.
The cuts also led to school library closures: one in eight schools no longer have a library where they can place the commemorative jubilee book on the shelf.
A similar situation faces school nurses – while there were 2,984 school nurses in England in June 2010, this has reduced to 2,047 as of June 2021.
Other pastoral resources, such as teaching assistants and school mental health services, have also been reduced. Spending on children with special educational needs and disabilities has been squeezed. Services, including speech and language therapy, educational psychologists and mental health support had historically been provided by local councils, however this trend was largely stopped due to austerity measures.
Teachers have also reported having to pay for school equipment and books out of their own pockets, with 2019 data showing that one in five teachers were spending their own money on classroom supplies.
Meanwhile, the Department for Education has identified an £11 billion bill to manage repairs to England’s school buildings. The rising costs of school repairs followed a decision by the then Education Secretary Michael Gove choosing to axe Tony Blair’s £55 billion ‘Building Schools for the Future’ plan. Gove chose to cancel building works that were already approved or about to break ground, although some builds did eventually go ahead. Gove is now the Secretary of State for Levelling Up.