We already feed, clothe and counsel suicidal kids – what more does the government expect from schools?

Independent

26-03-2025

The joys of spring are absent from school staffrooms today, as school leaders try to parse the implications for children and families of the cuts to welfare provision included in the chancellor's statement.
The lesson of George Osborne's austerity years is that shredding the welfare state always affects schools, even when their budgets are nominally protected. Increasing stress in the family home, less money for school supplies, insecurity of housing, rising hunger – all of these are felt, not only in raised tensions and lower morale in classrooms and corridors, but directly as calls on scant school resources.
The key to understanding the potential impact of this spending review – in which, we understand, schools will not be protected – is to recognise the extent to which schools have long shouldered the weight of social support once shared across multiple agencies. Much of this forced burden was accumulated before the Covid-19 pandemic, but has grown heavier since.
My own school is commonplace in feeding and clothing children whose families cannot; in subsidising, or paying outright, for children to travel to and from school; in providing counselling to suicidal adolescents whose councils lack provision; in truing up the often frankly mendacious estimates of support required to provide children with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) with the education they deserve. All of this before paying teachers and despite funding per pupil that remains, for all schools, lower than it was in 2010.
Services like these will be at risk in the coming spending review. They cannot be secured by hypothetical 'efficiency savings', already proffered as a source of funding half the recommended adjustment to teachers' pay scales. Headteachers will be forced to follow the example of councils in deciding who they can save and who they cannot. Expect the language of 'thresholds' – a euphemism for acceptable levels of pain already common in local government – quickly to permeate schools.
As always, children from poorer families, who depend most on the state, will suffer quickest and suffer most from cuts in welfare spending. The situation will be felt the worst in poorer parts of the country, the designated educational 'cold spots' where schools are already battling a post-Covid epidemic of antisocial behaviour and truancy.
But don't expect creeping miserabilism to spare Chelsea or Cheadle. Parents with any appreciable means are already meeting more of the costs of their children's education in the form on payments for school supplies, trips, and the like. This principle will increasingly embrace anything outside of classroom-based teaching.
Along with children's wellbeing, family stability and community cohesion, welfare cuts will threaten the government's own stated vision for Britain. Take the Curriculum and Assessment Review, which aims to preserve students' access to as broad a curriculum as possible. The review panel's interim findings show how the Conservative government used accountability measures to browbeat state secondary schools into focusing on 'Ebacc' subjects, such as English, maths, science and modern languages, and to neglect creative subjects such as music and drama.
But schools' curricula cropping was also motivated by cost pressures. The subjects that fared worst over the past decade, such as design technology, are the most expensive to deliver. Continued pressure on school budgets will drive these subjects further into the weeds and make the aspiration of a rich, rewarding schooling experience for all children all but unachievable.
Further cuts will also undermine the government's stated aim to woo the middle classes away from independent schools. The education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, is fond of asking why state school kids shouldn't have access to the sort of theatre trips, orchestral performances and sporting trials that independent school kids take for granted. It's exactly the right question. But there is no honest answer that doesn't address the vast and growing differences in resources available to fee-paying schools and their publicly funded counterparts.
Also at risk will be the government's ambitious agenda for national economic renewal. The Department for Education has already axed the advanced maths premium, top-up funding available to schools offering advanced maths qualifications such as further maths A-level. This will mean fewer 18-year-olds able to study computer science and similar subjects at university and, soon, fewer twentysomethings able to power the AI-driven industries which the government says will 'kickstart' Britain's sluggish economic growth.
Headteachers tend to be realists. We are not 'cake-and-eat-it' types. We recognise the ruinous state of public finances. But schools and the communities they serve remain vulnerable. And there is no national renewal that does not begin by securing our children's education. Yale law professor Daniel Markovits says that advantage turns on effort, talent and investment. For most students, that investment comes from the public purse. Now is not the time to cut it off.