“(The Conservatives) would make thousands of teachers, teaching assistants and support staff redundant in the next few months if they have their way.”
Ed Balls, Education Secretary, Labour press conference, 14 April 2009
The background
Ed Balls is indignant, even using the big R word. The Conservatives would make thousands of teachers, teaching assistants and support staff redundant, he says. And the Tory plans were also denounced by 51 head teachers in a letter to the Guardian this week, who said they feared “across-the-board cuts”.
This amounts to an average of one member of staff per primary school and five per secondary school, Labour claims. It seems an awful lot, and will no doubt worry make many teachers and parents, but is he right?
The analysis
Mr Balls’ claim is based on the same reasoning as his claim that the Conservative proposals would cost the Children’s and Schools budget £1.7bn.
The Conservatives have committed to finding £6bn of efficiency savings in this financial year, or cuts depending on your point of view, but they have ring fenced health, overseas aid and defence. That therefore means they have to chop the equivalent of 2.8 per cent off the budgets of every other government department and, as the Institute for Fiscal Studies points out, education is the largest unprotected area of spending – totalling £1.7bn of Mr Balls’ £63bn department budget.
But the claim takes this one step further. In Labour’s supporting document they use the same calculation and apply it to the amount spent on teaching salaries.
The part of Mr Balls’ budget for schools alone comes to £37.2bn for 2010/11, of which 78 per cent is spent on staff costs. So the staff budget will have to be cut by over £800m (Labour have rounded the savings per department to 3 per cent, giving them a total of £860m to be saved from schools staff).
So, their argument goes, if you then apply this calculation to the cost of teachers, teaching assistants and support staff, the £860m is the equivalent of 38,173 staff – 21,141 in primary schools and 17,032 in secondary schools.
There are 17,809 primary schools and 3,343 secondary schools, so that’s at least one member of staff cut at every primary school and five at every secondary school, Labour argues.
And, so their logic goes, with less staff, class sizes will also have to rise.
But there are a few holes that undermine Mr Balls’ numbers. Firstly this all relies on the assumption that budget cuts would not only be distributed evenly among the government departments that are not ring-fenced, but also apply evenly to the component parts of that budget.
And second, the Conservatives have provided scant information of exactly where their savings will come from, and have insisted they won’t until they are in government and in possession of all the facts.
Ordinarily this would make it difficult to tell if Mr Balls’ assertion stacks up. But in this case the Tories have made some clarifications that undermine his claim.
The Conservatives insist that the savings will not be spread evenly over all department budgets and that they would not target frontline services.
And, while they have said that some of the savings will come from “tighter control of public sector recruitment”, they say this will come from not replacing back-office staff who leave, not teaching staff.
Labour insists that without the detail from the Conservatives, it is reasonable to assume that the cuts will fall evenly across all budgets, including budgets for teachers.
They also acknowledge that the final decision on these cuts (whether to use redundancies or recruitment freezes) would be down to schools, but that given the timescales, the nature of school spending and the lack of pre-planning it is inconceivable that the Conservatives plans would not affect teaching numbers.
The verdict
FactCheck awarded Mr Balls’ a Fact rating for his claim ten days ago that the education budget could be subject to cuts of £1.7bn on the basis that departments would be hit evenly by the savings needed to be made under the Conservative plans.
But the leap from this to the Conservatives making thousands of teachers and teaching assistants redundant is a big one.
The Conservatives have insisted along the way that their savings will not target frontline services and that their controls on recruitment will focus on not replacing back-office staff and not teaching staff. But ultimately the lack of detail in the Tory plans is Mr Balls’ undoing.
Whether you believe the Tory savings numbers add up or that they will have to make more cuts to meet their targets, there is still no concrete evidence to back up Mr Balls’ claim that the Conservatives would make these redundancies other than an assumption that they cannot make enough savings without hitting teacher numbers.
