Seminar report: What to cut and what to keep? The fiscal sustainability of our education system

The Coalition has embarked on a major programme of deficit reduction involving real-terms cuts of on average 19 per cent across all government departments. The Institute for Fiscal Studies estimates that public spending on education in the UK will fall by 13.4 per cent in real terms between 2010-11 and 2014-15 – the largest cut in education spending over a four-year period since the 1950s.
 

Before the general election, Labour too acknowledged the need for substantial cuts to the education budget, setting out plans for a £1 billion reduction. With Ed Balls’ acknowledgement that, “under Labour there will have to be cuts, and that – on spending, pay and pensions – there will be disappointment and difficult decisions from which we will not flinch”,  there is consensus across the political spectrum that the pool of public funding for education will be smaller for the foreseeable future.
    

No area of education has escaped real-terms cuts under the government Spending Review. But strategic decisions about the distribution of these cuts have and will continue to be made in order to find money for spending priorities. This seminar set out to confront some of these difficult choices and to discuss how we should go about prioritising public spending on education, and why.
 

Speakers at the seminar included:
 

• Paul Johnson, Director, Institute for Fiscal Studies
• Anthony Painter, co-author of In the black Labour
• Sue Pember, Director, Further Education and Skills Investment, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills
• Ian Nash, journalist

This report provides an account of the issues discussed. It considers the following issues:
 

• Finding alternative mechanisms to public spending increases for achieving improved outcomes in education
• The capacity of institutional reform to eliminate 'perverse incentives' and achieve efficiencies
• Bringing investment into the education system from outside the public purse
• The role of evidence: how reform is served and hindered by its availability or absence