The ongoing challenge to ensure adequate funding for Petersfield

Thank you for the fantastic support we received from parents, grandparents, relatives and friends when you responded to the Funding Consultation. As you may have seen in the media, it remains a high profile topic.

Following our response to the Funding Consultation, we received a letter from the Department for Education which they have asked that we pass onto you. You can read the letter here.

As Headteachers, our response to this letter was to join over 500 Headteachers, including a significant number of Cambridgeshire Headteachers, who in one day signed this open letter to the, then, Prime Minister.

Dear Prime Minister,

On the steps of Downing Street you promised a country that works for everyone. That begins with our children.

Yet schools are facing real terms cuts of £3 billion. This will have a massive impact on young people and standards of education.

To make ends meet school leaders will be forced to make staff redundant, cut subjects, increase class sizes and cut back on extracurricular activity.

More and more schools are reluctantly asking for donations as a last resort to bring their budgets back from breaking point. Parents should not have to dip into their own pockets to make up for the investment government are unwilling to provide.

The future of our country depends upon the next generation. Their skills, their knowledge, their confidence and their creativity.

Let's stop seeing education as a cost and instead see it as an investment in the future. A good place to begin would be to reverse the £3 billion in cuts.

Yours,

Russell Hobby.

The story was reported in the Daily Mirror:

You may also have seen the BBC article which outlined the survey results that almost 1 in 5 parents are being asked to make regular payments to their child’s school due to budget cuts:

As a Governing Body, we firmly believe that all children are entitled to a funded education and are doing everything we can to highlight our plight brought about by the unfair underfunding of Cambridgeshire over several decades. This underfunding has seen the County being the very lowest funded county per pupil for many years.

We do, however, very much wish to thank and acknowledge those of you how have helped us in so many ways to make the money and resources we have stretch just that little bit further for the benefit of our pupils. In response to the volunteering, personal donations and donations from local companies, we have set up the following:

1. On our new MCAS system, there will shortly be an opportunity to donate any amount to the school. We are not asking for regular payments from parents as many schools are doing, but we do recognise that some people would like to make a donation either for a specific thing, event or pupil led fundraising activity. Therefore, if you wish to make a donation, please log onto MCAS and select ’Voluntary Donation’ to do so. There is an option to add a message as a note if you wish to do so.

2. Following a helpful suggestion, we have produced a 'wish list' of frequently used items that we regularly buy. If you need to 'top up' your basket for example in Amazon to avoid delivery charges, the following is a list of items we use on a daily basis. We will keep this list updated on our school website.

3. We have drawn up a list of jobs that need doing in school to improve the school environment. If you have a skill or talent from slab laying to sewing or gardening that could help or you have materials or equipment we could use to complete a job we would otherwise have to pay for, please contact the school office.

If you have any other ideas which could help raise funds, avoid spend or support the school in some other way, please do suggest them!

Thank you again for your support and the continued home-school partnership we prize so highly to ensure the most important thing – the very best education for our pupils that we can provide.