I have been a teacher for 28 years, a Headteacher for 13 years and, at the age of 52, this much I know about the School Funding Crisis and the National Funding Formula. It is time to put my head above the parapet regarding school budgets. We have had a real terms cut in our school budget of 10% since 2010, and don't let a politician tell you any different. Using the Bank of England Inflation calculator shows that we should have £800,000 p.a. more in our budget, if we had just kept up with inflation since George Osborne delivered his Comprehensive Spending Review in October 2010! The view from here. BBC Radio York's Sarah Unwin and the BBC cameraman Peter spent an hour with us on Friday to produce this report for the Yorkshire & Lincolnshire edition of Andrew Neil's Sunday Politics Show on BBC1. I promise it's worth 3:55 minutes of your time to watch: [wpvideo H0SHKhaO] Investing in our schools is obvious common sense. What wasn't included in the report but which is the ultimate consequence of not funding our schools properly is a deepening of the recruitment crisis. If working conditions and teachers' pay worsen because of the cuts to school budgets, then we will struggle to entice our brightest and best into the classroom. We are already at a point where the highest-achieving A-level students are least likely to apply to teach. The teacher recruitment crisis is not about just numbers, it is about quality too, and if our best graduates reject teaching as a career due to the impact of real terms cuts to school budgets, the very future prosperity of our nation will be threatened.
