Why a Yorkshire head teacher wants to be in the Question Time audience

John Tomsett, the head at Huntington School, in York, and one of the founding members of the Head’s Roundtable group asked whether the issue was not high on the political agenda because the “funding scenario for schools is so bleak.”

Now he is hoping he can raise the issue in a Question Time leaders special on Thursday night.

Although both David Cameron and Ed Miliband have pledged to ring fence education funding, schools are braced for a real terms cut in spending after the General Election.

The Conservative pledge for schools funding was to protect spending at its current level but not in line with inflation while Labour’s spending pledge does not take into account increasing pupil numbers.

In a blog on the issue Mr Tomsett wrote: “Remember 1997? In his latest book Alistair Campbell recalls that back then education was [New Labour’s] number one priority... None of the main political parties seems to be talking too much about education this time around.”

He adds: “I’m afraid that whichever party wins the next election there will be further cuts in the public sector. Irrespective of who wins the General Election, the Institute for Fiscal Studies has predicted a cut in schools spending of between seven and 12 per cent, with the latter the most likely figure. Over the next four years schools are going to lose £1 in every £8 we currently have to spend. And the cuts we have made over the last four years mean we are not quite sure how we are going to continue to thrive. There may be some London schools which don’t know how to spend their huge surpluses, but every head teacher I have spoken to recently has little idea how to balance the budget over the next few years.”

Yesterday Nick Clegg said that protecting education funding would be a “red line” for any deal to bring the Liberal Democrats into government.

The party has said that it would spend £2.5bn more than Labour and £5bn more than the Conservatives on education, protecting funding from early years to further education.

Mr Tomsett said he was hoping to be among the audience for this week’s BBC Question Time programme featuring the party leaders.

He said: “I want to ask each one of them about school funding. I don’t want to hear about all the money that has been spent on free schools and academy conversions which has inflated education spending, because, on the ground, I know much better than them the current state of school funding; rather, I want to know how on earth, over the next five years, they think my head teacher colleagues across the country and I will be able to run our schools on the budget levels their manifestos are pledging. Or are they not talking about Education because the funding scenario for our schools is so bleak? If so, students, parents, teachers, head teachers and governors need to know.”

He said that despite pledges to ringfence education spending over the course of the last Parliament his school had faced a real terms cut of £700,000 over four years.

Mr Tomsett is part of the Heads’ Roundtable, a group of head teachers who came together in 2012 through social media and now campaign on behalf of school leaders.