Every day, headteacher Richard Slade crunches the numbers at the inner-city primary school he leads.
“Can we reduce the number of toilet rolls we’re buying?” he asks. “Do we need so many pencils? Does every subject need its own exercise book? Should we stop music lessons, or providing hot meals?”
These are the questions Mr Slade would like to invite the new Secretary of State Gillian Keegan to consider.
“I would love the Department for Education to come in and go through the books,” says the 57-year-old head of Plumcroft, a community primary in South East London.
“Even our sophisticated financial modelling shows the numbers just don’t stack up.”
His school faces a minimum £154,000 deficit this financial year.
“I am very hardnosed about budget,” he says. “When people leave, we don’t replace them. We don’t use supply teachers. We already have multiple classes with no teaching assistant.
"There is nothing left to give. PE lessons are not disposable. Music lessons are not disposable. Supporting our most vulnerable children is not disposable. We have got to the stage of reducing the use of glue sticks, not replacing 10-year-old iPads, and looking at how many pencils we buy, but that’s not going to save £154k.”
The Government recently announced £4.6billion over two years for schools – “£10billion too little and too late,” Mr Slade says.
“We’re at breaking point. It is a pure effort of vocational will to keep going. If we were a commercial business, we would have shut.”
The first letter to all heads from the new Secretary of State provoked a “see me” response from Mr Slade.
“The letter said schools were being given £2billion in 2023, and £2billion in 2024,” he says. “That’s £4billion – not the £4.6billion promised by the new Chancellor in the Autumn Statement – £600million seems to have been already disappeared by the DfE in less than a week.”
The headteacher’s stern question about the missing £600 million turns out to be on point.
The DfE says the extra sum will - in the end - be just £2 billion for two years after other adjustments involving the health and social care levy.
The issue is not with the multiple Education Secretaries that have filled the post over the past few years but the whole Department for Education, Mr Slade says. “Even by its own metrics, and those of the National Audit Office, it should be in special measures.”
A former city banker who became a “super-head” specialising in turning failing schools into outstanding places of learning, Mr Slade has never been on a picket line in his life. But the father of four says he’s now voted for strike action.
“I’m normally a small ‘c’ conservative, but we are facing systemic breakdown. We’re at that tipping point. It’s ultimately a political decision about funding education properly. We can’t survive any more on bite-sized starvation rations.”
He pauses. “When we lost a colleague two months ago to cancer, a part of my business brain was having to think about saving money by not replacing her. It’s deeply upsetting.
“She was only 45, a mother with a husband and two young children, I don’t want to have to think like that.”
He describes the Kafkaesque loop in which he is stuck.
Department for Education guidelines say schools shouldn’t spend over 75% of their budget on staff.
“By that calculation I spend £400k too much on staff – yet I don’t have enough staff,” he says. “It makes you feel you are going mad.
“To reach that target I would have to get rid of 20 teaching assistants. But then my school would not be a safe place according to DfE guidelines.” By that point he says the school would no longer really be a school anyway.
“If I make 20 staff redundant, we will be just occupying children so their parents can go to work,” he says. “I don’t want to put my name to that.”
After a decade troubleshooting from school to school, Mr Slade says he came to Plumcroft in 2010 to take on a new challenge.
“The school needed transforming in the first three years. I then wanted to see just how far we could take a state school so it became truly world class.”
In 2013, Ofsted – somewhat unusually – described learning at Plumcroft – as “joyful”.
For its head, this is all about “enrichment” activities that help give meaning to maths and English.
“We have almost 300 pupils on free school meals,” he says. “About half our pupils come from an estate that’s one of the 50 most deprived in the country. Yet our SATs results are well above the national average.
“Almost 400 children learn musical instruments, all children learn Spanish, we’re a centre of excellence for sport.”
The school even has a valuable Steinway Model B grand piano, paid for by renting out the hall to professional musicians.
To create more learning spaces, Mr Slade persuaded TFL to give the school a defunct tube carriage, and the PTA bought an old double decker bus.
“Our children think it’s normal to hear ukulele lessons happening on a tube train in their playground,” he says.
“Reluctant learners were less reluctant to come to school on a bus.”
He says the school prioritises children with special educational needs and disabilities because it benefits the whole school.
“Our children go to the beach not just because of topic work but because some of them have never seen the sea.”
In the David Cameron era, he was invited to No10 to talk about his pioneering obesity strategy.
“It had to be abandoned due to cuts. Almost all additional interventions across the school have had to stop as I don’t have the staff to lead them.”
A Department for Education spokesperson said: “We understand the pressures schools are facing at the moment due to the challenges of recession and high inflation.
“That is why in the Autumn Statement, we announced we are investing an extra £2 billion into our schools next year and the year after. This will be the highest real terms spending on schools in history totalling £58.8 billion by 2024/25.
“On top of this we’re supporting schools with rising costs through the Energy Bill Relief Scheme, as well as £500 million for energy efficiency upgrades to help keep bills down in the future.”
Mr Slade recently made the decision to retire early, at 60, to give himself the strength to fight out his last three years.
“Schools should be places of joy,” he says. “When you bring energy and focus, with the right budget and staff, something magical happens. Now, we don’t have the money to come close.”
It’s not just magic being lost.
“Put bluntly, if I were to make the cuts the DfE expects me to make, children’s safety will be at risk.”
