Your Focus Team has welcomed a U-turn on education funding by local Conservatives but more support is needed for our most vulnerable children.

Claire at the Fair Funding meeting in Yate this week

Last autumn the Conservatives consulted on three options – taking £3million from mainstream school funding to plug a black hole in the Special Educational Needs (SEND) budget, cutting £3m from SEND funding in the next year or doing a mixture of the two. Parents, teachers, students and your Focus Team all campaigned for “none of the above”. The Conservatives have now agreed that the council can effectively extend its overdraft to schools, not take the £3m from mainstream funding and give them more time to balance the SEND budget.

Of course this simply buys the schools more time to address the problem, SEND spending will still be reduced in the coming years. As parents have made clear, their children are already being let down, and reducing their funding can only make that worse. We will continue to demand better funding for our schools from Government.