So Becta are officially gone in the autumn: by closing the quango the government hopes to save £80m.

And beyond that the education department’s budget will be cut by another £590m. The Chancellor has said that schools’ funding, the Sure Start programme and spending on education for 16-19-year-olds will be protected. But that leaves a lot of the Education budget protected:

1. Sure Start: £1.8bn
2. General Schools Spending: £31.7bn
3. Teachers’ pension scheme: £10.7bn
4. Young People’s Learning Agency (the 16-19 part of Learning and Skills Council): £6.5bn
5. Academies and Specialist Schools: £1.1bn

That means only £9bn out of a total £61bn Education budget that can be cut. So that £590m will be a 7% cut of everything else.

If you assume that the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme will continue in some form (or at least that many contracts have already been signed and won’t be reneged on), then there is only £5bn left unprotected – and 13% of that will be cut.

If you work in a quango or agency (or a supplier company) that gets publicly funded outside of these protected areas, I would be pretty worried right now!

The unknown part is how much of what these quangos do is seen as really essential, and will just be reabsorbed in a re-organised Department of Education (i.e. Becta employees become DfE employees) and how much will just be cut loose.

And let’s be honest; the government will need to reduce spending again by double the amount next year, so by the end of 2011 over 40% of those ‘non-core’ activities of the Education department could have ended.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 24th, 2010 at 2:21 pm and is filed under Business, Education Policy, UK teaching. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.