We’re well used to cuts in primary school. Over the last decade or so, funding to primary schools has been chopped at every angle, sometimes very obviously and sometimes in a kind of invisible way.
The Minor Works Grant is paid to schools for minor repair work that needs to be done. This has been the case for a long time. However, the Minor Works Grant is now issued to include the purchase and maintenance of ICT equipment.
There is no separate grant to cover the cost of fixing equipment and there was no increase in the Minor Works Grant to make up for the regular cost of maintaining newer equipment in classrooms such as projectors, IWBs, visualisers, and so on.
While there has been a “minor” amount of funding allocated to almost all schools for a few years, this is supposed to be spent on new equipment.
The government need to up their game and fund the maintenance of ICT properly.
