by Dave Gilchrist
Schools in England face unprecedented cuts according to figures from Camden NUT Secretary Andrew Baisley. This follows cuts imposed by the government over the last five years that have seen many services slashed and around ten percent reduction in the budgets of sixth forms. In the new round school budgets could see reductions by as much as eight and a half percent by 2020. Inner city London areas could be hit harder, up to 24 percent in boroughs such as Southwark, Camden and Tower Hamlets.
The figures are based on calculations taken from the latest forecast from the Institute for Fiscal Studies and the Tory Fair Funding campaign. Education spending has not been cut in this way since the mid 1980’s when spending was dropped by 4%, and between 1994 and 1996 when it was cut by 3%.
Education activists met those cuts by setting up FACE (Fight All Cuts in Education) which severely challenged the John Major government.
In the light of this Jeremy Corbyn’s call for a National Education Service is one we welcome. The Anti Academies Alliance believes that setting up of a national campaign for education to fight both the cuts and the fragmentation of the education system caused by the academy programme would be essential to achieve this goal.
This could well be our last chance to save state education and gain back schools and money that have been shamelessly taken fro the public domain and handed to private individuals. These people who have no vested interest in education but plenty of vested interest in easy money are unaccountable and must be stopped.