I am grateful to those who sent me Christmas cards from local schools and added a message that our schools need more money. I agree, and have been pressing the government for this for sometime. I have been an active supporter of Fairer Funding for Schools at Westminster where a group of MPs has pressed for more money overall for schools budgets and a fairer funding formula between different local authorities and schools. As a result Wokingham schools will be receiving more next year, and I will keep pressing for further improvements.
I have also received a number of messages written in capital letters on various pieces of coloured paper also advising me of the shortage of money in some school budgets. As there is no name or address unfortunately I cannot reply to each of these. It is helpful if people do add their name and address, allowing me to reply and to seek further information where this would be useful. It appears these messages were all written by the same person using the same pen. I would judge them to come from a school source and to be from an adult. It would be good to know who sent them so I can reply properly.
January 4, 2018
Interesting that the call for more money for schools never factors in the silly amount of subsidy pupils whose parents speak English as a second language receive. Such pupils get an additional 20% (at least) of funding than other pupils. This compensates for the additional resource required to teach such pupils.
Without increasing the total amount of funding we could increase the funds for disadvantaged or mainstream pupils by mandating that those who can not speak English sufficiently to learn pay their own way (or at least their parents do) which seems a reasonable stipulation.
January 4, 2018
For the record the letters in capitals did not come from me – I advocate better schools spending not more funding.
January 4, 2018
Interesting that my post about the EAL funding to which this is a reply did not make it past moderation. Especially so since it was factual and made no reference to people or other websites.
January 4, 2018
A further consideration in this whole “schools need more funding” debate is the amount of money that is being taken out of schools’ budgets to fund teachers’ pensions.
This is where the funding “crisis” actually arises, without funding these over generous pensions schools would not need more funds than those which they already receive.
January 4, 2018
With apologies for multiple posts let us not neglect to mention the amount per pupil that is received in administration fees by academy chains (Harris, Ark etc)for running the school even though the school has its own leadership teams and governors.
This can be as much as 5% of the school’s total costs. Going into overpaid head office employees’ pockets.