How the education establishment got it wrong on cuts

One of the most successful political campaigns of recent years has been on school-funding, with various teaching unions driving home the message that state schools are desperately under-funded. This week, though, their credibility suffered a serious blow.

Responding to a well-publicised campaign run by the National Education Union (a merger of the NUT and ATL unions), the UK Statistics Authority said that it was unable to confirm the numbers behind the campaign “as the underlying data are not publicly available and the methodology is not wholly clear.” Rather awkward for the NEU itself, but also the educational establishment which had taken on their message pretty wholeheartedly.

So where did it all go wrong? As a former headteacher myself, I’ve got a pretty good idea.

The idea that schools are losing funding isn’t new: it’s been the message of teaching unions for years. The difference is that, in recent years, they’ve started to get more ‘creative’ about how they push it.