We first highlighted our concerns about school funding to you in March 2017 (School Funding, news article). Our concerns persist. Insufficient funding for our school and constraints on our ability to absorb rising costs are now starting to impact on teaching, despite doing our utmost to prevent this.

School budgets across the country have been under pressure for some time. School leaders and the Governing Body at Fielding have been grappling with the funding challenges, leading to a number of tough decisions being made. In the last few years we have cut our staffing costs while preserving the quality of teaching by deleting one of two Deputy Head teacher posts, reducing the size of the Admin Team and changing Nursery provision. Today, we have announced that 3 teaching assistant posts in Reception and Years 1 & 2 will be deleted, taking effect from January 2018.

Our school is not alone. The National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT) has shown that seven out of ten school leaders think that their budgets will be unsustainable by the 2019 academic year. In July, the Department for Education re-allocated £1.3 billion for schools from existing budgets, but this is over two years and is not sufficient. Nationally, it is estimated that there is a £2bn gap in funding each year until 2022. It’s clear that the Treasury must now provide additional resources to resolve the funding crisis.

We will work hard to ensure that cuts have the least impact on teaching possible. However, rising costs and the estimated impact of the new National Funding Formula for school will mean that tough decisions will continue to have to be taken. Remaining as a local authority maintained school further limits our ability to absorb the cuts through growth, savings across more than one site and redeployment of staff. Therefore, we cannot guarantee that further cuts will not impact on teaching or the quality of our provision.

Please be assured that we will take the utmost care with budgets, to ensure all the money we have is spent effectively on your children.

We promise to let you know you in plenty of time if our budget means we’ll have to take further significant decision on staffing or activities.

If you are concerned about the impact of funding on our school, you may wish to support the school by lobbying local MPs, Virendra Sharma or Rupa Huq.