Schools to stay 1bn in the red, says NUT

The warning followed the publication of a school budgets study by PriceWaterhouseCoopers for the NUT that found a combination of increases in teachers' pay and in national insurance and pensions contributions, the cost of support staff and the implementation of the teacher workload agreement could push England's schools 1bn in the red. This is despite the Government's pledge of an additional 800m in funding - 400m a year over the next two years.

NUT general secretary Doug McAvoy described the 1bn figure as 'conservative' and said it was more likely to be around 1.5bn.

The PwC report looked in depth at 36 primary and secondary schools in six local authorities - Durham, Birmingham, Essex, Hammersmith and Fulham, Brighton and Hove, and Wiltshire - chosen to give a 'fair balance of types of authority facing different funding conditions', the NUT said. PwC said that due to the relatively small size of its sample, 'it is not possible to draw firm national level conclusions from the financial data collected from the authorities and schools visited during the course of this study'. But Mr McAvoy said the research was 'credible because of the nature of the sample'.