Extra £1 billion needed to protect schools from real-term cuts

According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), schools would need an extra £1 billion to protect them from real-terms cuts in 2019-2020.

The Fiscal research suggests that this is the amount that political parties would need in order to make a difference to school budgets.

The research by IFS associate director Luke Sibieta shows that an extra £1 billion would result in a freeze to per-pupil spending in real terms in 2019-2020.

The government's plans at the moment would see real-terms spending cuts of around 6.5 per cent between 2015- 2016, and 2019- 2020.

This would be the first real-terms cut since the mid-1990s and the largest fall over a four-year period since at least the late 1970s, according to the IFS.

The research adds that increasing the budget by £1 billion in 2019-2020 to £39.7 billion would "make it a bit easier to implement school funding reform as the baseline would be a real-terms freeze rather than a real-terms cut".