This Week In Education
We’ve all been there: that moment when you see an item in the sales that you really like. You don’t need it – not need need – but you’d rather like it all the same.
And, look! It’s only £30 now, and it was £80 originally. So, if you were to buy this thing that you don’t really need, you’d in fact be saving – yes, saving! – £50. Honestly, it would almost be profligate not to buy it.
The government now appears to be engaged in similar budgetary contortions in an effort to persuade schools that they will be saving – yes, saving! – money by paying more for their energy bills.
It has finally – though, compared with the 11th-hour announcements of the pandemic era, this one is positively preemptive – confirmed its plans to help schools with their energy bills over the coming months.
Ministers argue that their plans to reduce rates to £211 per megawatt hour for electricity and £75 for gas equates to – cue the fantasy mathematics – a saving of £4,000 for a school paying £10,000 a month on energy.
The rationale here – the original £80 presale price – is that wholesale costs this winter are expected to be around £600 per megawatt hour for electricity and £180 for gas.
The proposed assistance will initially only last for six months, with a review at the end of March.
Meanwhile, some schools have already faced dramatic bill increases. The finance director of a small academy trust in the South East of England told The Guardian that the trust has seen a 671 per cent hike in its gas bill.
And a DfE survey revealed that two-thirds of schools’ energy deals are due to expire within the next seven months.
But, continuing to treat the energy crisis like a moderately indulgent sales purchase, the government’s Education and Skills Funding Agency argued that many academy trusts were well-placed to respond to the current situation, thanks to “reserves, which we know trusts have worked hard to build up, and may well have been earmarked for other purposes”.
The key fact here is that heating a school is not, in fact, the same as deciding that the sparkly top with the little bow on the sleeve is really the only thing that you could possibly wear to the party next week.
For any government department who may need help with this: there is only one party next week, and you only need one suitably sparkly outfit for it. You dip into your savings, buy the top, deny yourself coffee on the way to work for a token day or two, and move on.
Heating a school, meanwhile – unlike a party – is not a one-off event. However it may feel at 3am when you can’t find your shoes/coat/partner/a cab, that party is going to end. If trusts dip into their reserves to heat their school this winter, what will happen next year, when prices remain high and their reserves are all gone?
Or, as Kevin Courtney, joint general secretary of the National Education Union put it: “Schools are still paying vastly more for their energy than was expected a year ago, with harmful consequences for education. Unless funding is significantly improved, schools will have little option but to cut class sizes, cut subject choice and reduce additional support.”
Besides, schools barely have enough funds available for other fripperies they might take a fancy to, such as paying teachers’ wages.
Five education unions have published a joint submission to the consultation on the School Teachers’ Review Body (STRB) report on teachers’ pay, claiming that the government’s proposals are insufficient to address the crisis in the teaching profession.
The STRB has recommended a five per cent pay rise from September 2022. This has been accepted by the DfE, which originally proposed a three per cent rise.
Trust leaders have already expressed concern that they now need to fund a pay rise without any extra money from the government to pay for it. (Immediate detention for the minister at the back yelling, “Reserves!”)
And the NEU and NASUWT teachers’ unions, NAHT school leaders’ union, the Association of School and College Leaders, and Community, the workers’ union, are now arguing that the STRB has “not gone far enough to remind the government of the need to protect teachers’ and school leaders’ pay”.
They add: “Real-terms pay cuts for teachers and school leaders have become an established feature of government policy.”
There are rumblings of strikes in the air, which may well please all those Conservative politicians who dream of a return to the halcyon era of the 1980s.
Speaking of which, the prime minister has asked the education secretary to draw up plans for new grammar schools in England.
Kit Malthouse, the education secretary, says that the prime minister made it clear during her leadership campaign that she wanted him to look into the issue, in response to a desire from parents in some parts of the country to send their children to selective schools. (The children of such parents are always – inevitably – academic prodigies. Notably, one rarely hears from parents keen to send their children to secondary moderns.)
“We’re all about parental choice,” Mr Malthouse told The Yorkshire Post. “Everybody needs to be able to make a choice for their kids.”
Unless, presumably, parents choose to have their children educated in well-heated, well-funded schools, by teachers who aren’t scanning the jobs pages for better-paid careers.
Click here to read Adi Bloom’s This Week In Education column every week.
