More cuts risk pupil and teacher safety, warns Shrewsbury special school head

Severndale Specialist School principal Sabrina Hobbs is part of a cohort of education leaders who are lobbying chancellor Rishi Sunak for an additional £5.5bn funds for schools before next week’s budget.

A string of local authorities in England have been told by the government to drain their school budgets to help pay for their special needs obligations.

Headteachers who back the lobbying say they are still being forced to reduce staff numbers and make cuts to essential provision, despite the government’s promises of an additional £7.1bn in school funding by 2022-23.

Ms Hobbs says teachers are being forced to take on medical and care responsibilities, and the school had to find and extra £250,000 to subsidise pay rises and changes to pension contributions which are not paid for by government.

“There’s a safeguarding issue there,” she said.

“Staff are having to do jobs they aren’t trained for. There just isn’t enough funding, that’s quite clear.

“I was speaking to one parent and he said it’s like Send (special education needs and disabilities) pupils are seen as an insignificance.

Hope

“It’s as if they think ‘what are they going to contribute to society?’ But these people should have a voice and should be looked after in the same way as mainstream pupils. The next step for us at Severndale is to set up a group of parents together who are keen to be involved in moving the issues forward and to give them the chance to speak to the all-party parliamentary group.

“That’s my hope. This has been an issue for a long time.”

She is also hoping that a centralised body with responsibility for funding special schools can be created, rather than having funding trickle down to the local authority, because Shropshire receives less per child than many neighbouring authorities.

The alliance of headteachers, school governors, councils and unions which is writing to the chancellor involves almost every significant organisation involved in state education – including the National Governors Association and a bipartisan group representing both Conservative and Labour-led councils.

The letter says: “Nurseries, schools and colleges are all struggling to meet growing costs and demands, with many having to reduce what they offer in order to meet their budgets.

“Much of that extra (7.1bn) funding will be swallowed up on rising costs including increased and unfunded pay rises that have been introduced. This jeopardises the promised real-terms increased budgets for the schools and pupils themselves.”

The Department for Education claims the government is “levelling up” funding and increasing high needs funding to £780m next year.