Education funding crisis likely to worsen according to headteachers

Ten years of managed decline in a north Wales county’s schools looks set to worsen as budget pressure mount amid the county borough’s education crisis.

That was the stark warning from headteachers addressing Wrexham County Borough Council’s Lifelong Learning Scrutiny Committee on Wednesday.

Schools are facing significant funding challenges – with 31 projected to go into a licensed deficit this year. That’s almost double the previous year.

Overall Wrexham’s 69 schools across nursery, primary, secondary and schools for pupils with Additional Learning Needs (ALN) are facing a budget deficit of £2.988 million.

And there was concern over the level of deficit at two schools in particular – Darland and the Maelor – which together represent almost two thirds of that figure.

Speaking on the broader issue facing all schools in Wrexham Chris Wilkinson, headteacher of St Joseph’s said there was simply not enough money to go around.

“One thing that unites us all from the Executive Board, councillors, headteachers and governing bodies is that there is not sufficient money in the system to provide the education that we’d like to provide for the young people of Wrexham,” he said.

“I’ve been a head for almost 10 years and that’s been 10 years of managing decline. At times it has felt like taking an axe to a staffing structure.

“School leaders and governing bodies are duty-bound every year to review their curriculum, take stock of their number of pupils they have and to ensure there are efficiencies in terms of having good use of staff capacity, rooms and the courses we can offer. I think on the whole schools and governing bodies do that well.

“The only way to balance a budget, because of the immense amount of the school budget that is taken up purely by staffing costs, is therefore to remove staff.

“Where that is via redundancy procedures inevitably school balances get worse not better in the first instance.

“Headteachers are often the face of these discussions with staff. The pressure on headteachers is overlooked as we deliver the messages of others because that is our responsibility.

“I think it’s likely that things will get worse before it gets better.”

Connected

Simon Ellis, Headteacher Ysgol Clywedog, agreed with Mr Wilkinson’s appraisal of the situation.

“I think you would anticipate headteachers are passionate about children’s education, you would want them to be so.

“Often headteachers become very connected with their schools and don’t always step back and deal with it entirely in a business way, but see the impact on children’s education and futures in a more closely connected way.

“I would ask councillors to be particularly mindful of the impact on our business managers and headteachers faced with these situations.

“If we are to make adaptations to our staffing we can only do that if there is funding. We need to provide redundancy costs for schools otherwise what happens is you create a negative cycle of further debt to pay for the redundancies. That starts a ball rolling that is very difficult to stop – in fact you have to cut harder and further than you ought to in order to bring costs back in line within a three-year cycle.”

Schools granted a licensed deficit have three years to return to a balanced budget.

Redundancies

Redundancies are a critical part of the crisis facing Wrexham schools. School budgets are top-sliced every year to provide a £200,000 redundancy payment pot that prevents schools paying out of their core budgets.

Last year for the first time that was exceeded and Wrexham Council stepped in to top it up. Headteachers and school governors have since reported that support was promised again for 25/26 – only for them to be told after they had planned their redundancies that there was no further financial support coming.

“This issue is systemic,” said Cllr Anthony Wedlake, who is also a governor at Ysgol Penygelli – which is facing a deficit this year of £37,700.

“I, my fellow governors and my interim headteacher went to meetings where we were absolutely told that not only were those redundancies going to be covered 100% by the local authority, we were encouraged to make braver decisions this year because it wouldn’t be on the agenda next year and we’d have to fund redundancies going forward.

“When I heard they weren’t being covered I remembered I had a signed-off budget that says all those redundancies will be funded. I’m not looking for a witch hunt – after all, the leader, deputy leader and lead member for education can’t agree on whether we have a crisis in our schools, but it is absolutely clear that this was the case.

“I discovered this when my new headteacher had a call and was told they would only get 20% of the redundancy costs which meant immediately my school had an extra £50,000 to pay this year. The advice was ‘you’ll have to make someone else redundant to fund the first two redundancies you’ve made’.

“On top of that, when we set our summer term budget, we were advised that we couldn’t include it but we had 15 additional new starters in September so we would get seven twelfths of their funding to help towards our budget issues. We’ve now been told we will only get 20% of that so we’re another £20,000 down.

“These are issues being compounded on top of issues. At the moment we do not have a satisfactory solution to that.”

Resolution

Karen Evans, Chief Officer Education and Early Intervention responded saying: “I have not heard those things in meetings I have attended but I have been told by Cllr Wedlake and other governors that they have been told that about redundancy funding and that is an issue we need to look at internally because if there is misinformation in the system we need to understand where and why.

“There is a will to do our best to support a resolution.”

Cllr Wynn added: “I will bang the drum and see what we can do for this year because as we can see, already redundancy pay is just shy of £900,000. I can’t make an assurance today that that money can be found but I am working with officers tirelessly and we hope to make an announcement soon.

“I want to see 100% of redundancies covered but I’m not in a position to say that right now.”

Cllr Dana Davies proposed finding £1.5 million of cash-limited provision to cover the redundancy costs and the authority’s increased ALN costs – avoiding the need to increase council tax to meet the costs.

“I’m putting a recommendation forward that Executive Board inflate the cash limited provision in 2026/27 to £1.5 million to increase the redundancy pot and the ALN pot otherwise we are setting our schools up to fail and our primary sector is not going to be sustainable.

“As Mr Ellis alluded to, with any school in deficit, you can only cut. It’s a false economy all round.

“We can always make corporate decisions as an authority to better allocate the money without increasing council tax. I’ll just say ‘hybrid’.”

Cllr Davies was referring to the costs of consulting on and implementing Wrexham Council’s new four-day office working policy, which was rejected by over 90% of staff.

Challenges

Regarding the specific challenges surrounding Darland and the Maelor Cllr Wynn refused to be drawn on the reasons why they represented such a significant part of the deficit.

“Studying the figures I’m very surprised that Darland School – which was always a beacon where people wanted to send their children – is -£1, 183,812,” challenged Cllr Robert Ian Williams. “Then I notice the Maelor School in Penley which is excellent, many children from my ward go there, is down £764,903.

“Those figures are way out compared to the other secondary schools. Have you got any explanation for those figures?”

Cllr Wynn responded that action was being taken to address the issues at those two schools.

“We are working with those two schools closely,” he said. “It’s going to take some time to pull that back to a balanced budget but please be assured that we’re fully sighted on it.”

Pressed further by Cllr Williams, Cllr Wynn refused to elaborate on the reasons for those significant deficits.

“I do think that the people of Wrexham need to know about these things, particularly people who live in those areas,” said Cllr Williams.