The London attacker has been named as Khalid Masood, the BBC tells us lots about him except of course his religion…they even tell us that he, presumably, posed as a teacher when hiring the vehicle that he used in the attack…no doubt the BBC would portray this as the cause of the attack..so disaffected was he by government ‘cuts’ to the education budget that it drove him to attack Parliament….pretty sure the BBC will find something in his life to explain away his terror attack and pass the blame onto ‘society’.
Still, the BBC is on a bit of a Jihad of its own against the government….did you notice that in the couple of weeks before the by-elections in Copeland and Stoke, in which Labour campaigned hard on the NHS, the BBC was pushing out lots of bad news stories about the NHS and its budget….just before the last PMQs before the by-election vote the BBC released its latest research…subsequently quoted in PMQs by Corbyn. Was the BBC trying to support Labour in the by-election? Similarly you may have noted the BBC going in hard on education….referring constantly to ‘budget cuts’ when in fact no cuts have been made, more money put in in fact…..as the NAO reports…‘government increased the schools budget by 7.7%‘. What is different is pupil numbers…they have shot up…due to migrant mothers having so many kids…another reason the NHS is under so much pressure. The BBC didn’t once make that connection in my hearing during all the discussions that flooded the airwaves.
Yesterday the BBC released another piece of its research on education, again just in time for PMQs and funnily enough Corbyn’s subject was education. Coincidence?
School governors have pointed to a “catastrophic” squeeze on budgets, as the government prepares to introduce a new funding formula for schools.
A snapshot survey of 4,000 governors by the BBC sheds light on the existing funding pressure in England’s schools.
National Governors Association head Emma Knights does however back the principle of the new funding formula.
Ministers say schools are funded at record levels and that the budgets rethink will end inconsistencies.
But the dramatic impact on already stretched budgets – even before the funding formula kicks in – has left ministers under pressure from Conservative backbenchers and head teachers in all areas of England.
Note nowhere does the BBC mention the actual cause of the ‘crisis’….
The difficulties being faced by schools across England were spelled out by the governors who responded to the BBC questionnaire.
“Diabolical”, “devastating” and “catastrophic” were among the words used to describe prospects for schools.
So…where exactly do the governors ‘spell out the difficulties faced by schools’? The BBC has merely produced a list of reactions not causes. Where are the causes of these dramatic impacts, the funding pressures, the catastrophic squeeze on budgets?
Oh hang on is this the explanation?…
The underlying financial problems faced by state schools in England were highlighted in a National Audit Office report in December last year.
The spending watchdog said schools would have to find £3bn in savings by 2019-20, amounting to budget cuts of 8%.
No…nowhere do we get the root cause of the ‘underlying financial problems’ ….some of the so-called cuts are in response to higher wage, pension and NIC costs…the BBC misses off the last bit of the quote…‘by 2019-20 to counteract cumulative cost pressures, such as pay rises and higher employer contributions to national insurance and the teachers’ pension scheme.’...the budget isn’t cut, it’s costs going up that mean efficiencies have to be made…..the schools have to choose between these and pupils’ education…but the real cost is more pupils…note the BBC’s report fails to mention this quote from the NAO…
Mainstream schools have to make £3.0 billion in efficiency savings by 2019-20 against a background of growing pupil numbers and a real-terms reduction in funding per pupil.
The Department’s overall schools budget is protected in real terms but does not provide for funding per pupil to increase in line with inflation. In the 2015 Spending Review, the government increased the schools budget by 7.7% from £39.6 billion in 2015-16 to £42.6 billion in 2019-20. While this increase protects the total budget from forecast inflation, the Department estimates that the number of pupils will rise over the same period, by 3.9% (174,000) in primary schools and by 10.3% (284,000) in secondary schools. Therefore, funding per pupil will, on average, rise only from £5,447 in 2015-16 to £5,519 in 2019-20, a real-terms reduction once inflation is taken into account.
Only in the BBC’s ‘reality check’ do we get a mention of pupil numbers…and no mention of immigration as the cause…a ‘baby boom’ but whose ‘baby boom’?…..
Reality Check verdict: The absolute amount of money in the pot for schools in England is at record levels but once you factor in rising pupil numbers, inflation and running costs, schools will have to cut approximately 8% from budgets by 2020.
It is true that this is the biggest pot in cash terms, but, of course, how generous the pot is depends on how many pupils there are in the system.
There was a baby boom in the early 2000s, which has been hitting primary schools for several years and is now moving up through the secondary system.
Between 2009 and 2016, the school system expanded to take in an extra 470,000 pupils.
The Department for Education says that between 2016 and 2025 there will be a further increase in the state school system, up from about 7.4 million pupils to about 8.1 million.
So there is a crisis in school funding, despite record levels of spending….and the BBC is not keen to spell out the real cause…mass immigration…and its costs. Immigration remember is beneficial and economically virtuous….as long as we ignore the extra billions we have to pump into the NHS, schools and housing, not to mention prisons, to keep the infrastructure going in order to cope with all these new people.
Record spending and wes till can’t cope…guess the answer must be more immigration as it’s so economically beneficial and pays for itself…no?
