On Wednesday 1 March over 100 people attended a meeting to defend Forest Hill School called by Lewisham National Union of Teachers (NUT). Forest Hill has discovered an £800,000 hole in its budget. The council is insisting on a restructure with the aim of losing £1.3 million off the wage budget. NUT members voted by 97% for strikes to stop compulsory redundancies and any increase to workload.
The meeting displayed resolute opposition to the cuts and an eagerness to act. The message is clear — the community, the children and the staff are not responsible for this deficit, and we are unwilling to pay the price for it. The meeting demanded that the council open the books. We need to see how this deficit happened. We also need to see what the alternatives are to the school’s restructure. It was raised that the school is still making very large PFI payments. Parents are working closely with the NUT, with regular leafleting organised and a series demonstrations being planned.
An emergency motion supporting the strike and calling for the council to defend the school was passed at West Lewisham and Penge Constituency Labour Party, a similar one will go to Lewisham Deptford Constituency on 9 March. Frighteningly, the restructuring at Forest Hill is due to an existing deficit and is separate to and on top of the cuts that all schools are facing.
According to the School Cuts website, set up by six education trade unions, the London Borough of Lewisham is facing cuts of over £21 million to its school budget by 2020. This amounts to £600 per pupil and is equivalent to the loss of 582 teachers’ jobs across the borough. Lewisham Deptford is 24th highest in the list of top 100 constituencies to be hit by the cuts, Lewisham East is 30th and Lewisham West and Penge is 38th.
Lewisham NUT is working on defending our schools, children, communities and members in this difficult climate. We are buoyed by our success in fighting off the attempts to academise several of our schools two years ago and by the fact we have managed to keep the vast majority of our schools as Local Government controlled schools. We also remember the lead our community gave to hospital campaigners when we won our fight to Save Lewisham Hospital. We believe we can fight the school cuts, save our schools and help build a model of resistance to defend our children’s education. The fight to defend Forest Hill will be the first foray and hopefully a model for the fights to come.
Government to splash out on free schools
The government is expected to announce an extra £320 million funding for extra school places in the budget on Wednesday 8 March. Will this money be spent where it is desperately needed? Will it do anything to offset the looming cuts of up to 25% expected by some local authorities? Not a chance!
The government is assigning the extra funding solely to the expansion of the free schools programme; they are also indicating that new free schools will be allowed to be selective. In February the National Audit Office found that the Department for Education had spent £863 million on land acquisition for free schools — not to mention extra money building them — but that most of these new schools were not built where they were needed. They estimated that of the 113,500 places to be created between 2015 and 2021, 57,000 would be unnecessarily replacing places in existing schools.
Many new free schools are undersubscribed and being subsidised by the government at the expense of existing local schools. The National Audit Office report also highlighted the bad state of repair of many school buildings, estimating that £6.7 billion is needed to sort it out 60% of the current school estate was built before 1976 and the cost of repairs is expected to rise. Yet the government is expected to allocate just £216 million in the budget for rebuilding and refurbishing existing schools.
All of this is without mentioning the £3 billion cuts to existing school funding expected by the new schools funding formula, and increasing running costs. Local campaigns against the school cuts are getting set up, with involvement from NUT branches and some local Labour Parties. Campaigning against school cuts, for fair and increased funding, should be a priority for the labour movement before schools are pitted against each other, staff are cut, and students suffer.
