NASUWT comments on chancellor’s £6.2 billion public spending cuts
Commenting on the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s announcement of package of £6 billion cuts to public spending, Chris Keates, General Secretary of the NASUWT, the largest teachers’ union, said:
“History will judge whether the package of £6.2 billion public spending cuts announced by Chancellor of the Exchequer today was premature or beneficial.
“The decision to protect spending this year for schools, 16-19 education and Sure Start is welcome. However, the announcement will need to be studied carefully to understand precisely where the axe will fall.
“The £670 million from the budget for the Department for Education could have serious implications for maintaining the quality of education provision in schools.
“Cutting over £700 million from the budgets of the devolved administrations will have damaging consequences for education and public services in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. In Wales for example, the funding gap per pupil between those in Wales and England was already a national scandal. This will simply exacerbate the problem.
“The public spending cuts announced today fly in the face of considerable international evidence that this could damage the prospects of economic recovery and could precipitate a double-dip recession.
“The Chancellor needs to match his tough talk on public spending by challenging his cabinet colleagues on the question of whether their policies and programmes make sound economic sense.
“The core of the Government’s education policy is a more costly model of ideologically-driven ‘free’ schools. It is not prudent for the Government to insist on such an experimental policy at this time.
“Extending freedom to 23,500 individual schools is educationally unproven and a massive drain on taxpayers.
“Rather than a ‘slash and burn’ approach to education funding, the coalition Government needs to look more critically at whether the current system is fit for purpose.
“Greater financial freedom and autonomy for individual schools is not cheap, does not deliver value for money and will require the Government to set up costly new arrangements to monitor how public money is used and to guard against financial impropriety.
“A bonfire of the quangos is based on flawed assumptions and may not deliver the level of savings or value for money the Chancellor is seeking.
“Hundreds of millions of pounds have already been saved as a result of the work of a number of education quangos which would not otherwise have been achieved by leaving individual schools to their own devices.
“The Chancellor has failed to recognise that quangos are not all bad. Some of the organisations whose funding has today been slashed by the Chancellor are better placed than individual schools on their own to achieve the value for money the Government craves.
“Despite the Chancellor’s claims, the cuts announced today will hit jobs not only in the public sector but also in the private sector. These cuts could also seriously undermine education provision in schools.”
ENDS
Stuart Gannon
NASUWT Press Office
Tel: 020 7420 9681
Mobile (and out of hours contact): 07966 198894
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