Insight into Educational Financing:  Talking with Rachel Welch, Head of Waterman School  

(22nd July 2014)

Aware that there was a lot going on at Waterman we held back from doing another interview with Rachel until the end of the Summer term. Here are just some of the things that have been going on.  We started off our conversation on a subject that is concerning many in education:

Rochford Life: Rachel, can we start of a bit differently today. I was having a conversation recently with someone else in the education world, and they said, “The trouble is that education today has to put so much of its effort into making ends meet, to raising finances even.” As both a head and an inspector you have quite a panoramic view. Would you feel that that statement from that person is fairly representative of the education world generally today?

Rachel: Yes indeed. Particularly for us as small school that is totally the case and that was part of the reason for me to go out to other schools and work for the local authority because that has brought in quite a lot of money this year for us to do things. Some of things will have a big impact on us such as pupil premium money where a lot of our children have free school meals and we have used that money quite a lot for salaries and all sorts of things. Now where the Government have brought in the universal free school meals for all children in Key Stage 1, we will now lose quite a lot of our pupil premium money, because parents will not be signing up and although we are trying to tell them that we will benefit and their children will benefit in other ways, I can’t see them signing up for it as much as they have done in the past.

RL: I presume, therefore you sit down and plan how you can get money in. Do you do that with the staff or with the governors or both?

Rachel:  Well the governors have to agree, as they had to agree for me to go out last year, but it’s trying to build capacity now for other people to do that as well. One of the things we have looked at this year and are progressing with is becoming an academy, which should help that. We’ve looked at several different options. Last year we were looking at going on our own, but the government have changed their criteria so you have to have at least 210 pupils so that wasn’t a viable option any more. We had looked at going with Rochford but they have gone with Westcliff and Prince Avenue. I said to the governors that I felt we were a little island because obviously things were going on with other local authority schools, that left us on our own.  Somebody I have been working with in the local authority has set up a trust and we were wondering about joining him, but the governors were not keen on their setup because he was talking about having one executive head over six schools but we said as a good school we wouldn’t need an executive head as such, so we have been talking to Debbie Rogan who was our executive head back in 2010 and are looking at joining her trust in Wickford, so we are moving forward with that. We had a consultation process and the parents were fine with that and the staff have been fine, so the governors approved that move at our last governing body meeting just recently. So we are looking at doing some joint things that will build our capacity for our school so more staff can go out and support other schools and thus generate more income.  It may also be more cost effective with three schools sharing costs     

RL: Isn’t Wickford a bit of a distance though?

Rachel:  Well we don’t want to be working in each other’s pockets but it’s not too far that we can’t, for instance, arrange non-pupil days and things like that together. There will be things that we are working on that are the same but at the same time some things that are school specific and different, for this school is different from Wickford and so on.  

RL: What are your numbers like for September?

Rachel:  We lose nine year 6’s and we have fifteen coming in, so we are full again, up to 95 I think it is. Our possible capacity is 105 but we have children joining other year groups as well so eventually we will fill those spaces.

RL: Constant changes!

Rachel:  Yes, and we’ve got lots of things happening in the school holidays. We’re having to have the hall floor replaced, and we’re changing our IT suite as well because our computers run on the old Windows system which is no longer supported. We’re gradually swapping those and changing our suite. We have ten iPads now and the children absolutely love those and we have laptops as well.  Cookery is quite a thing in the curriculum areas so we’re keeping all our cookery but having the flooring redone in that room, and our staff room is having a bit of a revamp as well.     

RL: Well it is all happening!  I won’t take any more of your time. Thank you again for sharing and we’ll look forward to the new things coming through next term! Thank you again.

Please also note we have just recently consolidated the many articles we’ve done on this school over the past three and a half years. You can find them by returning to the Waterman Contents Page