Education in South Gloucestershire is second-lowest funded in England
The county is in a funding crisis
Almost two-thirds of council-run schools in South Gloucestershire will go into the red next year, headteachers have warned.
It comes as a cross-party taskforce launched last year to find ways of addressing an ever-deepening education funding crisis in the district reported its findings to the Lib Dem/Labour cabinet.
The group was set up after school leaders revealed the drastic ways they were having to save money, including avoiding turning the heating up in the winter, leaving pupils having to wear coats in classrooms and staff putting on extra layers.
School clubs, trips and activities have been axed, qualified teaching assistants replaced by cheaper apprentices, class sizes breached and staff shared across year groups or even several schools, which can disrupt learning and crush morale among teachers and colleagues.
South Gloucestershire is the second lowest-funded out of all 151 education authorities in England, and academies are also bearing the brunt and having to make cuts.
Twelve of the 68 council-maintained schools had deficit budgets in 2023/24 but this was forecast to more than double to 27 last year, with many forced to use dwindling reserves to balance the books.
South Gloucestershire schools forum chair and headteacher of Christ Church Junior School in Downend, Pippa Osborne, told the cabinet meeting on Monday, June 16, that this number was expected to rise to 43 in 2026/27 – nearly two-thirds of schools.
She said:
“This is not about mismanagement or one or two isolated cases, this is systemic across our schools.
“There is a really significant difference between our level of funding per pupil and the national average.
“For a typical primary school of 300 places, you‘re looking at £200,000 a year difference.
“That is significant in terms of what we can do with staffing and support for our children.
“This is not us saying that South Gloucestershire Council has the answer.
“There isn’t the money in our authority and we recognise that.”
Dr Osborne said schools and cross-party councillors must continue to work together and lobby the government for better and fairer funding.
She said: “We have also seen rising levels of need, rising costs of meeting the need, and these together are really worsening the position of all schools.
“What we have to deal with in terms of staff, children and families’ needs was significantly different pre-pandemic to where we are now.
“Yet our resources to tackle that are diminishing, especially because of the rising costs of National Insurance, pensions and pay rises.
“Because of that, we’re doing more and more with less and less personnel.
“We have seen huge cost-cutting measures that have had to happen to the centralised services, and things like the provision of catering, cleaning and GDPR services, health and safety and HR have all been terminated centrally, putting a great deal more pressure on schools, using skillsets we don’t naturally have and often resulting in worse quality for more costs to our budgets.”
Dave Baker, schools forum vice-chair and CEO of Olympus Academy Trust, told the meeting: “Academy trusts are funded differently and organised differently.
“We are still poor but we do have opportunity of scale within trusts and that gives us greater purchasing power, the opportunity to pool funding to support funding in greater need.
“In our experience the smaller the school the harder it is to make the money work.
“We’ve been experimenting with shared leadership across two schools this year as a way of saving funding.
“We’ve always got this dilemma of balancing educational need versus financial need where you damage one by doing the other.
“We’ve all had to consider mixed-stage teaching, larger class sizes and reduced leadership, and guess what, that has an impact on recruitment and retention and that’s why we’ve got a crisis about people not wanting to come into the profession.
“One disincentive for leaders to create stable schools is that the funding formula is predicated on having a cheap workforce, ie, inexperienced.
“It’s really difficult if you have an experienced, stable staff because you can’t afford to keep them because the money just doesn’t work.
“Analysis suggests it’s going to be a really difficult few years for us and we are looking for whatever help we can get and we are really keen to work with you to find some solutions and campaign together to get more funding for children in South Gloucestershire.”
Cllr Erica Williams (Conservative, Bitton & Oldland Common), who chaired the scrutiny commission schools budget task-and-finish group, told cabinet: “What we found was sobering.
“Many schools are operating with severe budget deficits, having exhausted their reserves just to keep up with basic running costs.
“The demand for SEND support continues to rise sharply, outstripping funding and pushing many schools to the edge.
“In some cases, school leaders are spending time fundraising to keep the lights on rather than focusing on education.
“This is not a reflection on poor management at all.
“On the contrary, we found consistent examples of strong financial control and innovation.
“What we are dealing with is a structural and national issue, one that requires immediate attention if we are to protect the quality of education in this area.”
She said the taskforce’s report made five key recommendations.
These are to continue work to reduce out-of-county SEND placements and improve provision while pushing for national reform, enable greater resource sharing across schools, write to the education secretary arguing for fairer funding, centralise work such as health and safety, HR and safeguarding to let schools focus on teaching instead of administration, and to press for more capital funding for school building maintenance.
Cabinet members will now consider the report and decide whether to adopt the recommendations at their next meeting.