By Sheila Mckenzie-
New education secretary, Gavin Williams is under pressure to address the growing complaints about insufficient funding to schools in Britain, mainly mainstream schools. The pressure is to address the recruitment and retention crisis and school funding issues.
Williams has not even started the job, but so loud is the call for him to address the problems of short funding supply in schools. The Department Of Education has presided over an improved level of education across the board of primary and secondary schools in Britain, with more children attaining good levels of reading and writing than in previous years. Tougher exams has led to harder preparations and greater demands on teachers , but the process has added enough stress on teachers to create a teacher retention problem.
Schools claim to be overworked with insufficient funding to support them. The complaint comes even after the D&E recently announced a 2.5% increase in payments to teachers. The rise did not cause the excitement we would expect from those at the receiving end, instead schools immediately said the rise still meant they would be paying the first two percent themselves.
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The situation is not to difficult to understand. If teachers are not being paid enough, Williams will have the task of assessing the whole problem and finding a way to deal with it.Mismanagement of government budgets in the past has led to some pessimism from the British government, but if retention rates for teachers are truly low, there will be a high need for intervention from the new education Secretary.
RETENTION CRISIS
Kevin Courtney, the joint general secretary of the National Education Union, said Williamson “must hit the ground running”, adding that his predecessors had “failed to make any serious progress on these issues”
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“We need to recruit 15,593 new teachers in the next three years, but teacher recruitment and retention problems are serious and getting worse,” said Courtney.
“Schools and colleges are still facing the effects of huge funding cuts, teachers and support staff are losing their jobs, and class sizes are rising.”
Paul Whiteman, general secretary of the NAHT school leaders’ union, said Williamson’s top three priorities should be an “immediate multi-billion-pound emergency investment in schools and colleges”, a 5 per cent pay increase for all staff and “clear backing for all schools regarding diversity and equality”.
“By our calculations, £3 billion of new money from the Treasury is needed right away to prevent any more of the damaging cuts to staffing, facilities and subjects that have been made,” said Whiteman, who added that the recent 2.75 per cent pay award was “a missed opportunity to begin to solve the staffing crisis. Geoff Barton, the general secretary of ASCL, agreed that Williamson “must now address the funding crisis in our schools and colleges”.
“The government has ducked this issue for far too long and its negligence in this regard has brought the education system to its knees.” Schools are waiting to hear full details of Boris Johnson’s school funding plans. The new prime minister has previously pledged an extra £4.6 billion a year for schools by 2022, but it is not clear how much will be forthcoming in the near future.
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