COMMENT: School fund plan doesn’t really add up (From Worcester News)

COMMENT: School fund plan doesn’t really add up

8:58am Tuesday 16th October 2007 in

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NEW plans to allow the Government to claw back five per cent of money left over in school budgets have received a less than warm welcome from local head teachers.

The government wants to allow schools to keep a certain amount of their funding in reserve at the end of a financial year.

If they have more than that, however, the Government intends to take five per cent of it to redistribute it to other schools.

While we understand that something needs to be in place to ensure that schools do not simply build up huge reserves of cash that should be spent on the education of its pupils, this seems a particularly ham-fisted way of going about it.

It cannot be right that schools that have managed their finances badly could potentially benefit by having extra cash pumped in from the reserves of schools that have been prudent.

Some schools may have made a decision to save a certain amount of cash and earmark it for a particular project.

At the moment they are allowed to do this. The new proposals would mean anything a school has in reserve above set levels (five per cent for secondary and eight for primary schools) would be subject to what is effectively a tax - even if the cash is being set aside for a project.

We do not think this proposal is good for our schools.

Those that have been prudent will now simply spend every penny they have. It will encourage short-termism in our education system.