The blunt answer is probably yes. Falling rolls, and a pupil driven National Funding Formula mean that even if a pay settlement is fully funded, some schools won’t be able to cover their present levels of expenditure with fewer pupils.
In the past 50 years, during periods when school rolls were falling, some redundancies took place, but new entrants from ITT often bore the brunt of the disappearing jobs. I recall doing a radio interview around 2010 about new teachers stacking shelves in Tesco because they couldn’t find a teaching post. For some primary school trainees, it might yet come to that state of affairs again.
The key issue for the next few years is, how will HM Treasury react to falling rolls when it sees funding for schools is now largely pupil driven. The creation of a National Funding formula so heavily tied to pupil numbers was a big risk. It was easy enough to turn a blind eye at the time the Formula was being created, as rolls across the country were on the increase. However, those of us with a longer vision could foresee that when rolls were falling, school budgets would quickly come under pressure. With staffing the largest component of school spending: less cash means less staff, even when there was the buffer of high levels of reserves accumulated for a ‘rainy year’.
In the past, HM Treasury has generally allowed the spending department at Westminster responsible for schooling o keep the same funding levels, even as rolls were falling, and when schooling was a local service councils could also prop up schools from Council Tax. I doubt that such an approach will be possible this time.
Falling rolls will mean falling income for schools and hence, redundancies. Such a scenario allied to parental choice means that some popular schools will up their marketing, and ride out the crisis, but less popular schools, and I include some faith schools in that group these days, with either face closure or the need to operate with lower costs and fewer staff.
With education probably lower down the pecking order in the forthcoming Spending Review than many other departments of state, certainly below defence and the NHS, and also not scoring highly in polling with voters, I can see HM treasury wanting to clawback some of the expenditure on education necessary when rolls were higher as an alternative to tax increases.
The macro picture doesn’t look great, and the new General Secretaries of the main teacher unions are going to face a tough battle, and almost certainly industrial action against a Labour government. In such action, the losers will be those living in our most deprived communities and not the parents that can make alternative arrangements: just look back to 2020, and what happened when covid hit our schools.
We are already seeing entrepreneurs marketing courses on ‘how to recruit pupils’ to schools worried about falling rolls.
What will be done for teachers either made redundant or unable to find their first teaching post? In the 2000s, I ran a regular career clinic for the ‘tes’, and offered career guidance and seminars for those worried about their futures. Maybe, it is time for some of the bigger MATs to work together to provide a service for teachers. The first action might be to allow those facing redundancy priority look at any vacancies as they arise. With modern technology, posting jobs to a defined group before general circulation seems like a good idea, and could save on redundancy costs if redeployment is possible. Perhaps, I should restart TeachVac now I am no longer a councillor in Oxfordshire?
John Howson 