Headteachers in schools around Warwick district unite to send cuts concern letter to parliamentary candidates

At a recent meeting of the Warwickshire branch of the National Association of Headteacher’s (NAHT) members decided to send the letter to make more people aware of their campaign against the cuts as next Thursday’s general election approaches.

Branch representative Paul Wyllie, who is also the headteacher of Kingsway Primary School in Leamington, said the letter had gone out to all primary school headteachers in the district for them to forward onto parents.

He said: “Schools have been doing things of their own including having meetings with parents and sending out letters to them but this is just a way of unifying that.”

The letter outlines the main concerns shared by the headteachers after figures released by the National Audit Office have shown there will be £3 billion less in school budgets between 2019 and 2020, which equates to roughly an eight per cent reduction for each individual school.

The NAHT claims that this would mean that a one form entry school with seven teachers would have to operate with six.

The union says it could also lead to larger classes and more mixed teaching, less maintenance of school buildings, less resources for pastoral support, mental health and staff to support special needs teaching, outdated IT equipment, fewer trips and after school activities and fewer GCSE and A-level options for secondary schools.

The letter also sates that while the Government is spending more on education than ever before the reason for this is that there are now approximately 500,000 additional children in schools across the country.

It says that the withdrawal of funding for items such as national insurance contributions, inflations costs, pay awards and the withdrawal of the education support grant along with the introduction of an additional cost for apprenticeship levies means that schools now have to fund these from their budgets leaving them with ‘less money to spend on children’.