Third of calls to 24-hour helpline related to redundancies amid fears new English bac will lead to more losses

This article is more than 9 years old

This article is more than 9 years old

Schools are preparing to make up to a fifth of their staff redundant in anticipation of huge budget cuts, it has emerged.

The number of senior teachers seeking advice on how to dismiss colleagues – and keep their own jobs – has hit a peak last seen in the late 1990s, a headteachers' association has warned.

The Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL), which represents 15,000 heads and deputies, said some of its members planned to make 15 or 20 redundancies out of a workforce of about 100.

A third of calls to a 24-hour helpline for senior teachers set up by the association are now related to redundancies – a big rise on a year ago, the association said.

ASCL has run five courses on how to make redundancies in the last year, and all have been fully subscribed.

Schools across the country are waiting to hear their budgets for the financial year starting on 1 April. Cuts to local authority budgets, in some cases falling numbers of pupils, and reductions to central government education grants will mean many schools are worse off.

ASCL's legal consultant, Richard Bird, warned that the government's flagship new qualification – the English baccalaureate – would compound the problem.

The qualification is awarded to pupils who achieve at least a C in their GCSEs in English, maths, two sciences, history or geography and a language.

Schools are now measured on the proportion of pupils who obtain this and it is published in national league tables. Bird said teachers of some vocational courses or non-English bac subjects would be more likely to face redundancy. "If there is going to be a shift in the curriculum because of the English bac, it will quite likely cause restructuring and inevitably create redundancies," he said.

He said senior teachers were also at risk because making them redundant saved a school more money.

Brian Lightman, ASCL's general secretary, said: "People might, in a few years, say, 'What's happened to teachers in those subjects [that aren't in the English bac]?'"

He added that his association had seen "massive demand for advice about redundancies".

The Department for Education has said no school will see reductions in funding of more than 1.5% per pupil. This does not include the extra they will receive for each pupil on free school meals.

The department has promised local authorities that they will not face a cut of more than 2%, even if they have a falling number of pupils.

A spokesman for the DfE said: "Ministers are clear that this is the best possible settlement for schools considering the dire public finances. It protects cash levels nationally for every single pupil to cover rising numbers and demand for places, with the pupil premium on top for those that need the most support.

"We know that hard decisions may have to be made locally – that's why we've put in additional budget protections at school and local authority level.

"Heads know the needs of their school and where their money needs to be spent to have the biggest impact on schools – that's why we're expanding the academy programme to give them complete autonomy over their budgets and stripping out ringfences from local authority schools funding so they can target cash where it is most needed."