Hoard of £760m could help fund staffing, says union
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Your support makes all the difference.Schools have been hoarding more than £760m of unspent funds despite the teacher shortage and complaints of financial hardship, figures compiled by the second-largest teaching union have indicated.
A total of £764,140,619 was sitting in the bank accounts of English and Welsh schools at the end of the financial year 1999-2000, according to a survey by the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers. The surplus was an average of £30,000 for each school, almost enough to pay two newly qualified teachers.
The previous year's surplus was £524.9m. Schools' bank balances were expected to have risen to nearly £1bn in 2000-01, the union estimated.
Nigel de Gruchy, the NASUWT's general secretary, called for the money to be shared with schools struggling to fill teacher vacancies, to let them hire extra teachers and pay bonuses to existing staff to persuade them to stay on.
"It is appalling that schools can sit on millions of pounds of cash when some areas desperately need more money for extra teachers and to meet the needs of children from disadvantaged communities," Mr de Gruchy said. "The money must be distributed fairly across the country according to need."
Local education authorities are required to delegate 90 per cent of their education budgets to schools, only keeping enough back to run central services such as school transport. Mr de Gruchy called for more money to be held by local authorities and spent on recruitment.
David Hart, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, said: "The NASUWT's figures are crude in the extreme and they don't take into account the need for carrying money forward as contingency reserves. The NASUWT is trying to set the clock back 50 years, but current thinking is to give schools the maximum amount of discretion over their budgets."
John Dunford, general secretary of the Secondary Heads Association, said schools had low reserves compared with other organisations. "The levels of reserve hide facts such as money that has been committed but not spent, money that has been spent but not billed, and money which has come late in the financial yearfrom many different funding streams."
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