Day 181 – Primary Funding

It takes massive sums of money to change an authority’s schools from three tier to two tier. Redeployment of buildings and of staff (600 redundancies are planned in Bedford Borough) takes a vast amount of resources in itself, which is perhaps why BSF programmes have been beset by bureaucratic overspend, especially on consultants’ fees – £350M, even if it does exist, may well be insufficient for the task ahead.

Where, of course, funding is practically non-existent, is in the lower-primary switch. Estimated at a maximum of £60M in the consultation document, with £30M of borrowing against future capital receipts, this is a woeful underestimate of the true cost. Remember, this is the same number of pupils being subsumed into lower schools as into upper schools, and it is intended to cost about 1/6.

The real scandal is that Bedford Borough is that any shortfall in funding for the change to two-tier is going to be taken from the Dedicated Schools Grant. Read our letter to Chairs of Governors from September 1st.

This, of course, is in addition to the national £2 Billion cut in schools’ budgets from 2011.

Schools are under enough financial pressure as it is – why would we subject them to a very uncertain future by creating potential chaos?