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New Junior School Class Loses Teaching Assistant

My daughter has just begun Junior School, and she is happy and excited in her lovely new uniform.  On Friday us parents were invited to a meet the teacher session which was overall very positive.  Unfortunately we also found out that my daughters class has absolutely no teaching assistant support at all.  Last term we were told that due to cuts we were only to have a TA once or twice a week.  Now nothing.  The other classes in her year are more in need.

The teacher asked if anyone would like to volunteer to read with children, or help them with handwriting, or show them an interesting new skill etc.  I am the class representative, and I am asking the other parents if there is anything they can do to help.  Which feels positive and supportive.

At the same time I am angry and upset because I think our children will now be in a class which has to be very tightly controlled, the emphasis will have to be on rules, boundaries and discipline because how else can one teacher manage thirty 7 – 8 year olds?

My daughter was 6 two weeks ago.  She is one of the youngest in her class and school exhausts her.  She is clever and sociable and so she is coping well, but I worry that she is showing signs of stress.  She’s only seven!  She is angry and withdrawn some afternoons after school.

I think this is a good opportunity for schools and parents to bond, and to show mutual support.  I really love our schools, I don’t want to feel angry like this.  I hope I can do something to help.

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How can we survive?


As Chair of Governors of a small one-form entry primary school, I have just come back from a Finance & Premises sub-committee meeting, tearing my hair out and wondering how on earth I can make a difference to the appalling lack of funding for schools this government is providing.

2 years ago, as a new governor, with a brand new Headteacher and Deputy Headteacher, I oversaw a complete staffing restructure – actually make that 3 staffing restructures – in one academic year.  We had a forecast of being £750,000 in deficit within a 3-year period.  The reason being? A lot of children with SEND, equating to the need for more support staff, a lot of teaching staff that had been at the school for many years, all at the top of their pay scale and ever growing pension costs.  But most of all, while salaries, pensions and other costs increased, funding for schools remained static for very many years.  Indeed, two years ago, our staffing costs made up 96% of our total income.  The benchmark figure for schools is set at around 85%.

We took action.  We made many staff redundant.  We cut hours.  We restructured the timetable for teaching.  SEND children were not going to get the interventions that they needed but we, as a school, were not receiving funding for.  EHCP funding is a whole other issue.  We rescued our financial forecast, but there was blood, sweat and many tears along the way.

Today, right now, we have a balanced budget.  But lo and behold, the National Joint Council has just announced a 2% pay award for all teaching assistants which in turn increases the “on-costs”.  Also, we are to expect a compulsory 2% pay award increase for teachers from September.  Again, the increase in “on-costs” and an increase in pension costs all around.

Of course our educators absolutely deserve this… and more in fact.  But where is the money coming from to pay for it?

2 years on, looking at our 3 year forecast, we see that our staffing costs will be at 90% of income for the next year and 96% in three years time.  We are straight back where we started 2 years ago with NO further increase in funding and worse – it is reducing, due to the new “Fairer Funding Formula”.  Fair?

We have cut costs wherever we possibly can.  Parents are providing toys and equipment for children to play with at break times.  We are now going to ask parents to buy school stationery for us via an Amazon Wishlist.

I do not know how our school can survive right now.  In 3 years’ time, we’ll have another whopping deficit.  And apparently, we’re in a pretty good situation compared to other schools, due to the action we took previously.

The education system in the UK used to be acclaimed.  If action isn’t taken soon, I fear it will be infamous.

Surely we now all have to stand up, be counted and campaign for more educational funding?

I’m in.  Are you?

This story is from Brent. 

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TA support is being cut due to cuts.

My daughter is just finishing Infant school and has been brilliantly supported by a fantastic team of teachers and teaching assistants. The children in her class with SEN have had a fantastic designated TA and the class has had one for the mornings. My son is about to start the same school and while he will have a teacher and assistant in reception, due to cuts in Yr 1 and 2 they are now moving to have 2 assistants over 3 classes. I worry about the impact this will have on the support children get. I also worry that the previously well resourced nurture groups and extra support groups that my daughter and her friends have benefited from will no longer be funded. I know that one of the specialist reading support TAs who previously worked with children in small groups, will now be in reception as that is where full time roles are. This seems a waste of her training and a loss to children who need help.

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Headteacher resigns over cuts

I was a teacher from September 1980 until August 2017, with two short breaks for maternity leave. Despite moving up though the ranks, becoming a Head in 2014, I never stopped teaching, with the quest for outstanding teaching and learning being my passion. In many ways, the 9 years I spent as an AST were the most fulfilling, but I succumbed to headship because I wanted to influence T&L across a whole school; I adopted Steve Covey’s, ‘The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing’, with T&L being that ‘main thing’.

Unfortunately, as soon as I picked up the reins, I could see that the school was heading towards financial difficulties in the next academic year, due to cuts in funding and rising costs. Many may not know this, but a stand-alone Academy cannot submit a deficit budget without the threat of being put into financial special measures by the Education Funding Agency (EFA), so I had no choice but to take evasive action.

Whilst it was my strong belief that I should devote my time to leading T&L, I had to put the ‘main thing’ to one side and become a financial strategist, which is hardly what I trained for. Staffing is easily the biggest financial outlay of a school, so that is where I had to start. I wrote a 12-page ‘staffing restructure and deficit reduction plan’, which was no mean feat, and whilst its contents are lengthy and probably not interesting to many, I detail it below, because you need to be aware of just how many cuts I had to make, and how serious and unpalatable they were:

•            The number of planning periods per teacher per cycle decreased by one

•            The number of teaching groups in Years 7 and 8 decreased by one (thus larger classes)

•            The ‘extra’ teaching groups in the core subjects in Years 10 and 11 removed

•            The disapplication groups in Year 10, except for SEN pupils, removed

•            VCert music removed as a GCSE option for Year 10

•            Food technology removed as a GCSE option for Year 10 and removed from KS3

•            AS French removed as an option for Year 12

•            Art and photography taught together in Years 12 and 13

•            Workskills Springboard removed from Year 12

•            Departmental capitation reduced by approximately 10%

•            CPD limited to training for the new exam specifications only

•            Stationery ordered centrally, not by department

•            Work experience removed for the majority of pupils in Year 11 (only remaining for the few who would really benefit)

•            Business & Enterprise budget reduced

•            Alternative curriculum reduced

•            The equivalent of one full time post removed from the SLT team, and the portfolio distributed amongst the remaining SLT members

•            One food technology teacher post removed

•            All 4 Lead Practitioner posts removed

•            The fourth post on the leadership spine not undertaking SLT responsibilities removed

•            The number of TLR points per subject leader, and the number of non-contact periods per subject leader, to be based solely on the number of teaching periods delivered by the department (thus leading to a reduction)

•            TLRs for Thinking skills, Data, Business & Enterprise and Work-related learning removed

•            The TLR for Alternative Curriculum reduced from TLR 2 to TLR 1

•            The TLR for Exams reduced from TLR 2 to TLR 1

•            One science technician post removed

•            One food technology technician post removed

•            The administrative roles of 1) Cover/attendance, 2) First Aid/Administrator, and 3) Educational Visits Coordinator amalgamated into two roles

I cannot begin to explain how upsetting and disagreeable I found these changes to be; they amounted to a saving of approximately £410,000 and yet by the end of the following academic year, it was clear that we would have to cut more subjects at A-level and more staff, and that is when I decided I could not and would not go on. I felt that I would be condoning the government’s regime of underfunding if I continued to hack away at the curriculum and staffing still further, just to balance the books, especially as it struck me that it was likely to become an annual occurrence.

I was coming up to 60 when I reached ‘enough is enough’, and in that sense I was more in a position to ‘go’ than a Head in their 30’s or 40’s say, but I had been a single parent for 21 years by then, my two daughters were saddled with huge student debt (after completing 5 university courses between them), and I had an interest-only mortgage, meaning I would have to sell my house to pay it off, so my decision wasn’t without its complications.

But personally, it’s the emotional toll, not the financial one, that I feel most acutely. I ‘went’ at least 5 years too early, with so much  left to give.

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More teaching hours, less planning time, less marking time

I am a teacher in a Sixth Form College. Over the last few years, the number of full time teaching hours per week has increased from 21 to nearly 26 hours. Out of a 30-hour College week, this means many staff working from 8.40 to 4.10pm with only lunch breaks, which are inevitably taken up with preparing lessons, moving resources etc.

The increase in hours is directly attributable to the huge cuts in Post-16 education. The increase in hours means as teachers we now have to do nearly all our planning and marking out of school time. The marking load in Post-16 is huge, as you can imagine A Level students write long essays! The end outcomes of these cuts result in one or more of these:

a) Teachers make short cuts in marking and planning, resulting in less well prepared lessons and less formal feedback for the students

b) Teachers work for 3+hours per night outside of College

c) Teachers work part-time hours and plan/mark on their ‘days off’

d) Teachers leave the profession

With rising mental health problems in teenagers, we need more time to nurture these students, not less. In my neediest GCSE retake classes with students with all sorts of SEN issues, there is hardly ever a teaching assistant. Students who are making transitions from PRUs back into mainstream education are expected to cope with the demands of independent BTEC learning with no in-class support, as there is no money to provide this support.

Teachers are leaving in droves, and never because of the teaching.

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Squeezed budgets are driving experienced teachers out of the classroom

Cuts are forcing teachers out of the classroom: sparking a reliance on expensive consultants for expertise and endless rounds of recruitment.

We often hear of the teacher recruitment crisis, but that’s putting the cart before the horse. The real issue is retention. Until that’s been addressed, what’s the point of recruiting, only for teachers to leave? Squeezed budgets are leading to the loss of support staff – from teaching assistants to admin support – and swelling class sizes. This is adding to an already punishing workload, putting even more pressure on teachers who are already struggling to cope.

I’ve been concerned about the loss of experience from the classroom, and schools are increasingly shunning experience by advertising jobs specifically for newly or recently qualified staff, or for teachers on the main pay scale only. Some are saving money by ‘encouraging’ – in some cases by unethical means – experienced teachers to leave.  Obviously schools then have to mitigate the loss of accrued knowledge and expertise, perhaps by turning to expensive ‘consultants’ or adding to the ranks of ‘advisors’. It’s also a false economy in the sense that in the current climate recently qualified teachers are more likely to leave teaching altogether, meaning another expensive recruitment process.

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Hidden scandal of the erosion of SEND services

What follows is a personal story, but I am writing it is an illustration of what is happening in SEND services across the land. Last September I retired after 32 years of being a teacher, mostly in Local Authority SEND support services and special facilities. I took early retirement at 55 because I couldn’t tolerate the stress of working twice the number of contracted hours that I was supposed to work, due to absurd workload, and the stress of feeling that I was failing vulnerable children and their families.

This workload increase, and reduced provision for children, was caused by covering the work of other people whose posts had been “deleted” in response to government cuts (the loss of the Revenue Support Grant and the real terms diminution of the High Needs Block which LAs receive to pay for SEND services, special schools and EHCPs).

To make it worse, most LAs SEND support services have been marketised: schools have to pay for them – but from nothing!  With schools having ever reducing budgets they stop purchasing LA services, then more cuts are made to services, and teachers workloads increase, and the services to children and parents decline; and then the remaining services are deemed to be of little help by schools and parents, because they don’t have enough staff to do a good job any more.

This is happening across the land  – SEND services evaporating everywhere – and on the whole only the parents of children effected and the teachers in those services really know the size of the cuts and the size of workload the remaining teachers face.

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Science GCSE students being failed

My daughter and her science class, which are due to take the 3 GCSE individual sciences have been let down by not having a consistent science teacher for the last 2 years. The teacher was ill but the achool did not provide a qualified science teacher to replace her so science was not taught. They now have a new teacher, once the previous teacher left but htis new teacher has only 2 terms to cover 3 science GCSE curriculums. The ‘struggle’ that the children and the teacher have are shown in their PPE results, where although the students were targeted to get 7/8 grades, most got 4/5 grades. These students worked hard to be chosen to take the 3 GCSEs in year 9 and many want to continue with science in the future. The new teacher came in to teaching from a scientific career as she wants to get more people, specifically women into science and she has been giving alot of extra time to the students.

The rumour is that the school could not afford to replace the teacher while the previous teacher was signed off ill.

The teacher has also commented that the text books are not complete for the science curriculums.

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Cuts, cuts and more cuts

Swimming pool has been closed as on-going and repair costs prohibitive, despite parental contributions.

Trips close to being cancelled as can only go ahead if all parents contribute, previously contributions were voluntary, now compulsory. Additional voluntary donations accepted.

Governors asked school to undertake staffing review, many staff voluntarily resigned, retired or taking redundancy. Reorganisation and reduction of remaining staff.

Staff leaving and not being replaced.

Higher Level Teaching Assistants (HLTAs) covering teacher planning time and sickness absence, avoiding use of supply teachers where possible

Planned purchases for resources have been cancelled, PTA asked to fund if possible.

Caretakers had cleaning added to their duties.

If key stage 1 (KS1) teaching assistants (TA) absent no cover provided.

Printing and photocopying budgets restricted.

Resources in classrooms running low, e.g. glue sticks, pencils, whiteboard markers, pens….limited resources in the playground (lots of what’s being used looking shabby).

PTA paying for fun learning events for children that the school can no longer afford – pirate day, street dance day, zoo lab, Christmas party entertainers and many classroom games, books, toys and resources.