FactCheck: sacking head teachers?
Updated on 19 November 2009
The Conservatives claim Schools Secretary Ed Balls promised to sack 3,000 head teachers. Did he? FactCheck takes in the homework.
The claims
"Are you going to stick to your pledge, which you gave to the Sunday Times in September, to sack 3,000 head teachers?"
Michael Gove MP, shadow schools secretary, Channel 4 News, 18 November 2009
"I did not make that pledge and that's a silly thing to say."
Ed Balls MP, schools secretary, Channel 4 News, 18 November 2009
The background
The Queen's speech has been delivered; the pre-budget report is due next month. With an election looming the heat is on for politicians to spell out what they would do, and how they will pay for it.
It was reported earlier this week that Schools Secretary Ed Balls was pushing for an inflation-busting increase to his department's pot, but last night on Channel 4 News his opposite number, Michael Gove, pressed him on a spending cut "pledge" made two months ago.
It was a pledge, Gove said, to "sack 3,000 head teachers". But Balls denied making such a pledge, saying it was a "silly" thing for Gove to claim.
So what did Ed Balls promise - or not promise - to do in September?
The analysis
"Labour to cut school spending" was the Sunday Times' front page headline on 20 September, the opening weekend of the Lib Dems' conference.
Balls gave the paper an interview about more than £2bn of planned cost savings in this department, the first minister to spell out detail of where the axe would fall in this way. (Just three months earlier, the PM was still adamant that the choice was between Labour investment and Tory cuts.)
The schools secretary talked of the need to be tough on pay, claw back schools' budget surpluses and cut procurement costs (the likes of insurance and fuel bills) by 10 per cent.
More controversially, he suggested staffing costs could be cut by "federating" groups of comprehensives under a single head teacher. "You might have a head teacher and a team of deputy heads working across the different schools," he said.
According to The Sunday Times, officials believed about 3,000 senior school jobs could go, mainly through "natural wastage" rather than a 3,000-strong purge.
Later that day, Balls gave more detail on the plans in a TV interview, saying he wanted to protect what he called "frontline staff" - teachers and teaching assistants. But the same could not be said for senior teaching staff.
"I think it's really important to have a head in every school, that's my view," Balls said, appearing to contradict slightly the impression given in The Sunday Times that heads would face the chop.
Not so for their underlings, though, he continued: "But under the head there's deputies, there's assistant head teachers and what we can do is we can pool leadership together and that can free up resource as well.
"What... I'm not saying is I'm going to impose from the top down you must do this. But if a third of schools did that, that would be getting us about a third of a billion pounds savings."
The verdict
Michael Gove's claim that Ed Balls pledged "to sack 3,000 head teachers" is, at best, an exaggeration.
But it's not the complete nonsense that Ed Balls' dismissal last night suggested.
Balls did outline plans in September - both in a Sunday Times interview and on television - to get rid of 3,000 senior teaching jobs, which he later clarified as being deputies and assistant head teachers rather than heads themselves.
He described this in the context of ongoing plans to get schools to work more closely together, with combined leadership teams - but it was condemned by teachers' leaders as an attack on front line staff.
Balls said the cuts wouldn't be forced on schools, although when a cabinet minister suggests a specific proposal it seems fair to say there's no smoke without fire - or should that be firing?
FactCheck rating: 2 for Balls, 2.5 for Gove
How ratings work
Every time a FactCheck article is published we'll give it a rating from zero to five.
The lower end of the scale indicates that the claim in question largerly checks out, while the upper end of the scale suggests misrepresentation, exaggeration, a massaging of statistics and/or language.
In the unlikely event that we award a 5 out of 5, our factcheckers have concluded that the claim under examination has absolutely no basis in fact.
The sources
Sunday Times: Labour's £2bn cuts for schools
Ed Balls on the Daily Politics
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