A spiralling multi-million pound deficit in school budgets could lead Wokingham Borough Council to “fall over,” a leading councillor has warned.
Primary school headteachers fear that plans to deal with it through cuts to school budgets could leave them even more stretched.
One headteacher said her school’s funding was so “dire” she would have to make redundancies – having already sacked teaching assistants. Another said “we absolutely cannot afford this”.
Wokingham Borough Council now expects its schools funding budget to have a total deficit of £19.5 million by the end of this financial year in March 2024. This is almost entirely down to the rising costs of providing services for children with special educational needs and disabilities.
The government has agreed to pay Wokingham Borough Council a “safety valve” grant worth just over £20 million between 2022 and 2029 to spend on special educational needs services.
In return, the council must promise to reduce its deficit in special educational needs, partly by skimming money from schools’ mainstream budgets.
Headteachers hit back at the proposals after Wokingham Borough Council sent them a survey asking them what they think of plans to take 1% from each of their budgets.
Many of them said this could leave them with even less money to support children with special educational needs.
In a Schools Forum meeting on Wednesday, October 11, Nicky Taylor-Dickens, headteacher at Willow Bank Infant School in Woodley, said she had already had to make teaching assistants redundant.
She said: “My situation is pretty dire and if I have to give more money then I will have to make more redundancies.”
Carol Simpson, business manager at Colleton Primary School, in Twyford, said she understood the council’s position.
“We are also in a situation where we have a number of schools whose three-year, five-year budgets look absolutely devastating.”
Councillor Prue Bray, responsible for schools, warned that if schools didn’t agree, the Safety Valve deal with the government could collapse.
She hinted that the knock-on effect of that could mean the council – which is trying to find £12 million of savings this year – could effectively go bankrupt.
She said: “The whole thing could collapse altogether. And the consequence of that is that in about three years’ time the council will fall over.
“All the services that we supply to you. All the things we do for the families that you look after. All those kinds of things – how we run libraries even – how we do everything, will stop.”
Despite this, council officers said they would consider asking schools to cut 0.5% from their budgets instead – and agreed to hold another “emergency” Schools Forum to discuss the plans soon.
