Michael Ferry is the headteacher of St Wilfrid’s Catholic School in Crawley, West Sussex. The school has 943 pupils and is rated as good by Ofsted. In 2017-18 it received income worth £5,157 per pupil, nearly £700 below the national average.

We have had to save in the region of half a million pounds by not replacing staff who have left. That’s £500,000 saved, and we still need to find more. I can’t rule out having to make similar savings in the future.

Support staff have been reduced over time. My forecast for next September is that I will have 10 teaching assistants, and I found out yesterday I will have 20 students with education, health and care plans (EHCPs). It’s going to be really tight for us just to meet our statutory requirements.

The knock-on effect is that children who would have got extra support a few years ago are getting more limited support. Students who, five or six years ago, would have had a teaching assistant in a small class of possibly 10 to 12 students, if they needed extra one-to-one support, that’s not now going to happen.

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We are proud to be a very inclusive school, but what is happening is that we are being forced to make decisions with ever-reducing resources, which means that the pupils with the highest needs are getting support while the ones with less-high needs are being made the scapegoats.

Sometimes we need extra help from outside the school to support our children, but with the reduction in funding across public services, we are all struggling. And now it’s apparently the schools’ fault that knife crime is on the rise.

We used to have a police community support officer until three or four years ago. He was a fantastic link to the community and the local police. He was employed 50% by us and 50% by the police, and he was stationed at the school during termtime. He was absolutely brilliant, the students loved him, he built up positive relationships and he was a phenomenal asset. Completely gone now because of budget cuts.

Access to [child and adolescent mental health services], there’s a six months waiting list unless you’re suicidal. So if you are just self-harming ‘sorry, we’ll put you on the waiting list’. The reductions in all those support mechanisms means that parents turn to us, and we do what we can with what we’ve got, which isn’t very much.

That is the serious reality. If we can’t do something that’s cost-neutral or close to it, then we can’t do it at all. Parents have been extremely supportive in terms of anything we’ve asked for. They’ve been brilliant, but the reality is that we can’t offer everything that we used to do.

You look three years down the line and unless something happens soon we are condemning these kids to a lack of opportunity. Departments and subjects will get cut because they are expensive. If we only end up with English, maths and science, and not music and drama, then those subjects will die. They have already died in some other schools.

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In 10 years’ time we will rue the day that students were allowed to leave school without the skills and qualifications to be able to make a positive contribution to society.

The reality is that we have made cuts year on year. My worry is that we are reaching a point where if significant action on funding doesn’t take place soon, the ability of schools to perform at a high level will drop off a cliff. We are performing miracles with nothing, and the nothing is getting less.