Next Government Faces ‘Painful’ Choices Over School Funding: Report

The party that wins the general election will face a “painful set of choices” over school funding, with “immediate spending pressures” including special education needs provision and repairs to school buildings, a think tank said on Tuesday. The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) estimate that school costs will grow by 4 percent in 2024, compared with economy-wide inflation of 1 percent. The growth is driven by increases in staff pay and rising food and energy costs, the economists said. “This could leave the purchasing power of school budgets about 4% lower than in 2010,” the report published on June 4 said. The analysis, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, also said that there has been no real-terms growth in school spending per pupil in 14 years in England, which the IFS called “historically unusual.”...