A Hove school is having to cut its spending by about £100,000 this year and is inviting staff to volunteer for redundancy.
Cardinal Newman Catholic School head James Kilmartin said that the financial cuts would be bigger in future years.
Staff have been invited to a meeting at 3.15pm today (Thursday 23 May) when they will be given more detail.
A human resources consultant from Brighton and Hove City Council will also be at the meeting in the Dance Studio at Cardinal Newman.
In a letter to staff on Monday (20 May) Dr Kilmartin said: “Dear Colleagues, Following the all staff meeting on Thursday 25 April 2019 where I briefed you on the challenges the school is facing in terms of our financial situation, I would like to invite you to a meeting with me to discuss this further and how we may address this going forwards.
“Paul Elliott, HR consultant, from the (council) HR Advisory Service, will also be attending the meeting and trade union representatives from Unison and the GMB have also been invited.
“As you know the school is facing unprecedented financial pressure because of a real terms cut in funding from central government of over 8 per cent since 2010.
“We have responded to this by reducing our costs (eg, for cleaning and catering) increasing our income (via more students and lettings, etc) and by restructuring some staff teams.
“All of this has enabled us to save over £300,000 in the last two years and to balance our budget for 2018-19.
“However, the financial pressure continues and we now have a projected budget deficit of nearly £100,000 for 2019-20 and it will be higher in future years.
“As 85 per cent of our costs relate to staffing we need to consider whether there are any savings we can achieve here.
“Therefore we would like to invite applications for voluntary redundancy or a voluntary reduction in hours from within our support staff administrative teams. Full details will be given at the meeting.”
The honest situation if you want a good school you need to go to a private school.
If James Kilmartin took a pay cut and ran the school, rather than making him self principle and employing two separate heads for the school and college, then the school might be able to start saving money. The kids need all the support they can get and by axing the jobs of the support staff he’s running the school into the ground!! I’m speaking as a past pupil, CNCS as a whole needs a new leadership system!
Rather than criticising the leadership team, perhaps we need to look at the real cause….persistent funding cuts made by the the government! Schools are on the point of collapse.