27th March 2017
Dear parents,
School Funding
We are writing to you to highlight the funding challenges that our school faces, and will face in the coming years. You may have seen a number of stories in the media around this issue, and we wanted to inform you about how Chapel Street Infants School is affected.
In recent years it has become apparent that current budgets are unsustainable. We have been grappling with the funding challenges, leading to a number of tough decisions being made. The main school budget has not increased for several years, meaning that all cost of living rises such as electricity, gas, water and any changes to wages, employers pension contributions, national insurance etc have had to be paid for from the same pot of money. As Local Authority services have been reduced, we have also had to pay for more services.
Moves to a national funding formula for schools, creating a fairer funding system, will not bring the benefits to our school that we had hoped to see. The School Cuts website, analysing DfE funding data, projects that our school, along with other schools in the local authority, will lose at least £17,454 or the equivalent of £178 per pupil by 2020. These figures do not include any reduction in the Nursery Budget.
Our school is not alone. The National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT) has shown that more than half (55%) of school leaders in a recent survey felt that their deficit would be untenable by 2018/19. Funding pressures are being felt across all phases and in all schools, not just our own.
The school works hard to ensure that cuts have the least amount of impact on teaching as possible. However, rising costs and a static budget mean that many tough decisions have already had to be made. In the future, we cannot guarantee that such cuts will not impact on core teaching, despite doing our upmost to prevent this.
Please be assured that the school will take the upmost care with budgets, to ensure all the money we have is spent effectively on your children.
Due to decreasing budget and falling numbers of children in School we will probably lose one teacher this year.
Yours sincerely,
Mrs. Angela Walton Mr. Alan Steel
Headteacher Chair of Governors