The news that Budmouth College and All Saints School have both been ranked as inadequate is deeply worrying for pupils who attend these schools, or plan to do so, and for their parents.

It is also extremely dispiriting for the staff of those schools and for the Weymouth community as a whole.

There is no secondary school now ranked as good anywhere in Weymouth and Portland. But changes to the way in which schools are judged, funded and supported has meant that this news is no surprise.

Progress 8, a national measure introduced in 2016, gives all secondary schools an average score for the progress their pupils make in a strict range of largely academic subjects.

But a Department of Education Report in July 2017 noted that teachers were concerned that this measure ignored any geographical differences.

Pupils in Weymouth and Portland, with some of the most deprived wards in the country, are measured against pupils from affluent regions, where more parents are able to pay for private tutors and to make financial contributions to the schools that their children attend.

This inequality is compounded by low funding allocations for Dorset and by further costs that have been added to schools’ spending.

In 2016, the cost of national insurance contributions was transferred to school budgets, as part of measures to reduce central government spending.

This increased the cost of each teacher to the school by an estimated five per cent. Schools have also had to manage the impact of the substantial cuts that have been made to local authority children’s services, which have resulted in children bringing more of their problems to school, and an increase in seriously disruptive behaviour.

Cuts in Government spending are having far-reaching consequences in education and our children are now paying the price for these policies. All children deserve to attend good schools but schools are bound to struggle when more burdens are placed on the staff, who have to pick up work that was traditionally done by local authorities and social services.

If schools are not performing well, we should not rush to lay all the blame on the staff.

We should look at the failures of the government’s education policy, and recognise that large cuts in funding are bound to have a significant impact.

Elaine Walker,
Greenhill, Weymouth