The claim

At first, the prime minister’s education speech at a school in north London today appeared to suggest that the inflation ringfence that has previously protected the schools budget was to remain in place.

At lunchtime, David Cameron told the audience gathered at Kingsmead school in Enfield that his party would make sure schools were “properly funded” and that the Tories had demonstrated over the past five years that the schools budget could be protected at the same time as reducing the deficit.

“The amount of money following your child into a school – that will not be cut,” he said emphatically.

He went to say that since the number of pupils is going up, so too would the amount of money going into schools.

So not only were the Tories promising no cuts, there would be more money. Which sounds reassuring for schools, but is it?

The evidence

No sooner had the prime minister finished his speech than the difficult questions began. Pressed by the BBC’s Nick Robinson, Cameron quickly conceded that the schools budget, while not being cut, would not be going up with inflation. In other words, it’s a cut in real terms.

“I accept that that is a difficult decision for some schools because the amount of cash per child is not going up by inflation, the amount of cash is staying the same,” he said.

Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, put it in context in an interview with BBC Radio 4’s The World at One. He said Cameron’s commitments represented “quite a watering down of what we’ve had over the current parliament where schools, along with the health service, have been protected in real terms, with a really big effect on spending on other parts of public services, because schools and hospitals are about half of everything we spend on public services.

“The amount per capita in cash terms will stay the same, the amount of cash going in will go up, but certainly the amount per pupil in real terms will go down over that period.”

He added: “That’s not terribly surprisingly really given the scale of the cuts this government are saying they need to implement overall over the next parliament. To give more protection than that to schools would mean even deeper cuts in everything else.”

Luke Sibieta, director of programmes at the IFS, fleshed out that picture with more detail. The good news is that because the number of pupils is going up between 2015 and 2019, the budget in cash terms will go up by the same amount, as Cameron promised.

The bad news is that even allowing for the extra cash, Sibieta estimated that the real value of the overall schools budget would be eroded over the next parliament because it would not keep pace with inflation. That would amount to a shortfall of about 7% in real terms.

On top of that, there are new pressures on school budgets that will reduce the money available in real terms further. Employer pension contributions have been increased for schools by 2% to ensure the schemes are better funded – that money will have to come from the schools budget. As will an extra 3% for employer national insurance contributions, which have changed as a result of the new single-tier pension.

Taken together, that amounts to a cut of 12%, when inflation and the consequences of teacher pension and national insurance contributions are factored in.

“It’s certainly less generous than we’ve seen over the previous parliament,” Sibieta concluded.

So will the education budget be ringfenced after the next election?

No, at least not under the Tories. Labour seems have signalled that it will protect spending in real terms, but the details are yet to be spelled out. The Liberal Democrats have committed to protect the entire education budget, from three to 19, in real terms. Which sounds like a fence.