Tory #schoolcuts are forcing this school to cut its MATHS budget by 20% #GE17

The NUT’s ‘schoolcuts‘ site has seen huge traffic before and during this election campaign, increasing even more sharply when Labour announced its education policies and resulting in previously Tory voters switching to Labour. At the end of last month, the SKWAWKBOX spoke to NUT General Secretary Kevin Courtney, who told this blog:

We’ ve seen a huge increase in traffic to our schools cuts site – and it was already high. From October last year to last week, there had been three million views. The NUT is not affiliated to Labour [the union voted against affiliation by the narrowest of margins at its recent conference] but after last week’s party political broadcast with Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell talking about education cuts we saw half a million hits last weekend alone and we’re really pleased to see education is the number three issue that people consider important for this election.

The Tories’ big problem is that they broke their manifesto promise to protect school funding. Half of schools in the country are facing cash-terms cuts and the other half are facing real-terms cuts in funding.

The effects of the cuts are manifesting everywhere: class sizes going up, cuts to lessons in art, drama and other subjects, reductions in staff numbers. We want people to be asking their candidates what they will do about it – and asking the Tories why they broke their manifesto promise.

The NUT site shows the scale of the cuts facing our schools and their pervasive effect:

But it also allows parents to see how their children’s school will be affected:

However, what it can’t do is reflect exactly how those cuts will work themselves out at the level of resources and pupils’ education. But that information is starting to filter out.

The SKWAWKBOX has learned that Calderstones – the second-biggest school in Liverpool – is facing cuts of such scale that it told its maths department on Friday that it will be facing cuts to its budget of twenty percent for the 2017/18 school year.

In maths.

One of the most core of core subjects.

Theresa May told her small audience last week that education is not just about funding, it’s about results. Well, imagine the results to your child’s education and life prospects of a 20% cut to his/her school’s maths budget.

Then think: if maths is that badly affected, at least the same is happening in English, science, computing and other vital subjects – and far more in supposedly ‘non-core’ areas. Going to university under this government, unless you’re rich, is to burden yourself with huge debts – but even that might become an impossible dream for children learning in a school with such huge cuts to core-subject budgets.

If you care about the education and life chances of your children, grandchildren, nieces or nephews you simply cannot afford to even think for a second of voting Tory.

Labour, on the other hand, as their leaked manifesto showed, will create a National Education Service to mirror our NHS, free to all, and will abolish university tuition fees – .so when your language-, maths- and computer-literate child goes to university s/he will leave with huge prospects, not huge debts.

You can’t trust a Tory with education – not unless it’s private schooling, preferably Eton or Harrow.

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