Most schools facing ‘unavoidable’ redundancies due to funding crisis

As reported to The Independent, ‘headteachers are having to look at every possibility given the current funding situation,’ school leader says

Most schools will be forced to make redundancies next year due to a funding crisis, according to a huge poll of leaders.

Headteachers have been raising the alarm over what they say is a widening gap between school budgets and spiralling costs due to rising energy bills, soaring inflation and unfunded pay rises.

In its largest poll of 11,000 school leaders in England, the education union NAHT survey revealed that most schools said they would have to make cut jobs next year.

Two-thirds said teaching assistant numbers or hours would have to be cut, while half said the same for teachers.

Vic Goddard, a secondary school headteacher in Essex, told: “redundancies are definitely unavoidable with no change in funding. Already done it twice. Not sure what I’ve got left to restructure.”

Pepe Di’Iasio, who runs a secondary school in Rotherham, said schools were “between a rock and a hard place” at the moment with funding pressures.

“Headteachers are having to look at every possibility given the current funding situation,” he told The Independent. The headteacher said redundancies had to be considered but stressed they were a “last resort”.

Paul Whiteman, the NAHT general secretary, said schools were being hit by a “perfect storm of costs” with energy bills, the price of resources going up and an unfunded pay rise for staff.

“With no fat left to cut following a decade of austerity, many thousands of schools are now looking at falling into deficit unless they make swingeing cuts. Education is truly in a perilous state,” he said.