Opinion

Budget 2024: Let's read the small print before we get excited

The Budget has promised billions of pounds for education, but as ever we must read the small print before we celebrate. Pepe Di’Iasio analyses what the chancellor had to offer schools
Image: Adobe Stock

Billions of pounds for schools – so read the headlines following the Autumn Budget on October 30. It sounds like great news, but what does it actually mean for your school?

The Budget, of course, deals in very big figures. But when that money is stretched across a large system – nine million pupils, 24,000 schools – it is a lot thinner than the impression which may be given by those headlines.

So, the good news is qualified. The Treasury calculates that the funding it is providing in 2025/26 will allow for a real-terms increase in school allocations. But this is an average across all schools, and we don’t yet know what it will mean individually.

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