‘All we can do is offer less to children’, admits Educating Essex headteacher over funding cuts

As the straight-talking and charismatic headteacher in Channel 4’s Educating Essex, Vic Goddard gave the nation the unvarnished view of the life of school - with all its ups and downs. Here, in a column for ITV News, he explains why that job has become harder than ever.

The budget cuts of recent years have left no part of the school untouched.

From difficulties in recruiting new teachers and removing subsidised school trips, to not being able to replace broken equipment, the cuts have affected every aspect of school life.

The per-pupil funding and the overall amount (known as GAG funding) is simply insufficient to cover the costs we are incurring. 

The government will often talk about the increases - which is £2bn across the sector, equivalent to £80,000 per school - in the GAG funding, but they don’t talk about all the other funding streams they have cut over the years such as the Education Services Grant that we used to purchase speech and language support. 

The unfunded pay rises last year and the massive increase in costs have not been met and therefore all we can do is offer less to the children.

‘How can we even the playing field?’

There are many things we cannot do now as a school because of budget restrictions.

For example, the positive impact of online learning across our community when we provided online devices to all young people was obvious. 

We intended to maintain this by continuing to provide one-to-one devices. But the moment the unfunded pay rises were announced last year this had to be shelved. 

This would have been a true investment in levelling up. 

Another impact is class sizes, which have had to increase due to not replacing teachers when they leave.

We cannot afford to subsidise educational trips to ensure they are affordable for all therefore we have had to stop offering experiences like going to the theatre. 

This may not seem much but when cultural capital is hit by poverty how can we even the playing field for our children?

‘Nothing left to cut that won’t put pupils’ progress at risk’

There are daily choices we are having to make because we simply do not have enough money.

We are not replacing staff. We’re not buying experienced cover teachers in when staff are absent, and instead we double up classes in the hall. 

We’ve not been able to replace broken equipment - whether that’s computers, sports kit or audio-visual equipment for teaching.

We have to buy in all support including for things like HR and legal matters – but we can’t afford it any more so this will increase the probability of mistakes being made.

We now say no to educational visits and trips. 

Even expensive experiments in science have been scaled back.

The only cuts left are to staffing and having already carried out two restructures there is nothing left to cut that won’t put children’s progress or safety at greater risk. We obviously cannot compromise on safety.

‘Impossible to recruit quality - we’ve had staff take retail jobs’

The other key challenge is recruitment - where the pressure on schools is making it impossible to recruit without having to compromise on quality. The government has failed to recruit enough teachers for more than 10 years and we are now in the eye of the storm.

We’ve seen staff leave - several going to cheaper places to live, and others going into retail jobs.

We’ve been very successful in recruiting trainee teachers over the last few years – mainly ex-students returning – and that has cushioned us from the challenge of staff moving on.

We’ve always had more trainees than we could train, so we had a field of candidates to choose from. We’d normally have up to eight - next year we have only two, and they are not in the subjects where there are shortages, such as science, modern foreign languages or computer science.

And the reasons are obvious.

It is a simple fact across any profession; if a job is difficult but pay and conditions of service are good then you can recruit.  If either aren’t good, you can’t. 

If anyone can tell me the answer to the recruitment and retention issues we are facing, which doesn’t include improving those two factors I want to hear it. 

Pay has been spoken about at length but the conditions of work are just as important. 

The job is more challenging than ever and then for the great and powerful Ofsted come in for two days every five years, to make a judgement on how good everyone is at their job and then summarise it in one or two words, is highly toxic.

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