Leadership

School Spending and Costs: The Coming Crunch

This report sets out the planned changes to teacher pay and assesses how changes to teacher pay, support staff pay and non-staff costs are likely to affect the growth in school costs.

This report by the Institute of Fiscal Studies concludes that after accounting for the specific costs facing schools, school spending per pupil will still be 3% lower than in 2010.

Following a period of real-terms cuts to school spending per pupil in England, the government has set out plans to increase school funding per pupil at both the 2019 and 2021 Spending Reviews.

The Department for Education also accepted the recommendations of the School Teachers’ Review Body (STRB) for teacher pay in England in 2022, which included slightly higher increases than planned for most teachers.

Rising levels of inflation will also have an impact on school costs, particularly given that a large part of the increase has been driven by rising energy and food prices, which constitute a large element of schools’ non-staff costs.

Real-terms changes in public spending are assessed based on economy-wide inflation and this usually provides an accurate picture over the long run. However, this time the figures are significantly out of line with actual cost pressures likely to have been faced by schools in the short run.

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