How Harris Westminster runs behind the scenes is not something most students think about. But whilst you are sitting through your lessons, CPs and clubs, staff are having to work increasingly hard to make sure that the funds for so much of what we enjoy here at HWSF do not run out.
Running a school is expensive. Last year, total expenditure at Harris Westminster was £5.4 million, equivalent to £9000 per pupil. Energy prices have risen by almost £60,000 since 2022, as have the prices of many basic necessities for running a school of almost 600 students.
How much funding do we get from the Department for Education (DfE) for that £5.4 million? About £4.3 million. Yes, last year we had a £1 million shortfall in government funding, and it’s been like that since HWSF’s founding.
This may sound surprising, given that there aren’t many signs of a decaying, underfunded school within Steel House’s sterile environment, but that’s because there is one factor that makes up for most of the shortfall: donations.
We don’t have the luck of some 300-year-old public schools with rich alumni who leave million-pound donations in their wills. But some of our alumni are in well-paid jobs, and with our 2016 leavers now in their mid-20s, they are helping the school recoup some of the investments that went into helping them get those jobs.
There are other sources for donations: the PTA does a huge amount in fundraising, and some “high-net-worth individuals” are occasionally happy to spare some money. We don’t have million-pound benefactors from big corporations to help us balance the books (like the Eton Star schools, which Eton is giving £1 million per year), but people are still willing to give back to the sixth form that helped them.
So, with that added income from donations our balance is now… still negative £193k. Ouch. If HWSF was a local authority funded school, it would probably have been academized by now. Thankfully, we already have the Harris Federation to make up for those shortfalls.
That doesn’t mean they’ll pay forever, however. The central pot of money that the Harris Federation provides to its institutions is meant to span all its 54 schools, and unsurprisingly taking hundreds of thousands of pounds is not a sustainable business model for a school to operate under.
The obvious question is: why doesn’t Westminster, our partner school, make up for the deficit? The partnership between the Harris Federation and Westminster School is non-monetary; they instead give a vast array of resources in the form of teachers, materials, shared subjects and more. Arguably, the non-monetary benefits provided by them are worth more than if they just handed us a lump sum of cash, and more sustainable in the long-term.
Then again, some schools have it worse. The Department for Education provides a great (or after looking at some schools’ finances, not great) school financial benchmarking website, and it reveals the grim financing behind some other sixth form “free schools” in London. “School 21” is a non-selective school in Stratford with just over 1000 students – including its other school elements, its in-year balance is a deficit £450k. West London Free School (11-18) is almost £250k in the red.
Those two statistics include non-sixth form components; that’s because of another factor that makes calculating sixth form finances very difficult. Whilst standalone sixth forms like Harris Westminster do exist, most sixth forms are part of a “mainstream” secondary school. Grant funding for such institutions is given in one lump sum, meaning that identifying how much was spent on sixth form funding requires complex analysis.
School funding is delegated to the Education and Skills Funding Agency (ESFA) which is ironically right behind Steel House – we walk past it when taking the back entrance. Whilst some blame it for the funding crisis, it has no real say in the overall funding that schools will receive (that is defined centrally). Rather, it makes sure that everything is correctly allocated. In 2022, many of its powers were stripped and brought back to the DfE, with many ESFA staff made redundant.
So, is the school funding crisis the DfE’s fault? It’s debatable. The DfE argues that it is investing record funding in education, and technically that is correct. Looking at the graph above, real terms funding allocations appear to be higher, and in the current fiscal year there has been a further uplift of £1.6 billion for all 16-19 education providers. Yet this is still over £1000 less per student compared to spending in 2002, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies – a £1000 decrease when the Sixth Form Colleges Association estimates that an additional £700 is required per student to make up for rising costs.
Educational institutions are uniquely positioned in a way that makes their finances tied to the state of the current economy. Much of the expenditure is on goods with prices that are heavily inflation-driven, as well as wages. As a result, expenditure has been driven up steadily since the pandemic, as well as by other “hidden” costs that are difficult to measure.
Another problem is that sixth forms simply receive less attention now than they did 20 years ago, in part paradoxically thanks to their success. 700,000 people took A-levels in 2002. In 2023, that number was just over 800,000 (Ofqual is due to publish their entry statistics for 2024 on 30 May). The real shift happened in the 80s, where the number of 17-year-olds in full-time education jumped from about a quarter in 1985 to over half by the 90s. The government regarded these successes as stemming from their large investment in sixth forms and decided to reduce it as a result, expecting future sixth forms to operate sustainably. Unsurprisingly, suddenly cutting a source of money to what has just become a paramount part of the education system was not a perfect solution. Until the 2010s, sixth forms got through for the most part on past reserves and other grants, but now many operate in deficit and struggle to finance much of their activities.
2020 led to a huge influx of sixth form pupils due to higher-than-expected GCSE results. Sixth form funding did not increase sufficiently to make up for the massively increased costs that sixth forms had to burden. With government plans to axe vocational BTECs, the number of pupils needing placement will only increase. According to DfE statistics, the number of inner London sixth form students on roll has increased by 10,000 since 2017, though to their credit the number of over-capacity sixth forms has fallen significantly.
The burning question is what will happen if we can’t make up for the shortfall. It’s not nice to think about, but inevitably it would lead to sweeping cuts across the curriculum. That might include cutting some of the extracurricular activities, like CPs or societies, or, in the worst case scenario, dropping the fourth A-level. At that point, what would differentiate HWSF from any other sixth form?
Our Head of School, Ms Scott, has a more optimistic vision. As the school ages and more alumni progress into better-paying jobs, they may be able to financially support the school in part, such as through the alumni organisation. The PTA is working tirelessly with the school to find donors, preferably some for the long-term. It still feels nightmarishly difficult to have to mix so much financial management with running a school like Harris Westminster: we should appreciate the careful work that goes into balancing the books to allow HWSF to run. Hopefully, that continues into the future.
With thanks to Ms Scott for her excellent Lab talk that provided the foundation for much of this article.
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