FOR a total of 17 of Iain George’s 20 years as head teacher at Janvrin School, he finished the financial year in the black. In his final year, 2024, he ended it £84,911 in the red.
He wasn’t alone. As the JEP revealed earlier in May, two-thirds of Jersey schools exceeded their budgets in 2024, with a total overspend of more than £2 million. Sources say that the deficits for the first five months are worse “by a long way” but the government will not release the data.
Mr George tells the JEP that he also exceeded his budget in 2023 (by £97,000) and is candid about why. Indeed, if he were still head of Janvrin he would do it again.
“I’m not even embarrassed about the overspend – actually I’m proud. I spent it on children,” he said. “I had no choice. And, actually, it doesn’t even come to a choice. It is not a moral dilemma. I would rather be non-compliant financially and take the criticism than not support a child.”
In recent weeks since the figures were revealed, teachers have spoken to this newspaper of a funding crisis that has seen schools struggle with a two-fold increase in the number of students with additional education needs. It has also emerged that up to 85% of schools’ budgets have been spent on staff since a wage deal for teachers in 2024 that followed a series of strikes.
Asked whether the wage increase is to blame for the widespread deficits, Mr George laughs out loud: “That was on the back of ten years of underpayment of teachers,” he says. “Ten years!”
“These are people who have gone to university, got a degree, got a teaching qualification, have been through stages and stages of accreditation to be a qualified teacher – and you want to pay someone £20,000 a year? If teachers are important, pay them.”
In 2023, Mr George’s penultimate year as head of Janvrin, the Jersey Schools Review Board report said that students “felt secure and happy” and noted the work of the pastoral team, which works closely with families and other agencies. “My pastoral staff would go down to Social Security or Housing and help families out with their forms,” he says.
Janvrin was also the first school to introduce free hot meals, after staff noticed children coming in hungry. “We saw the state of their lunchboxes,” he said.
The board noted that 70% of students were so-called multilingual learners (MLLs), meaning that they speak another language other than English at home, and praised the school for its levels of diversity and inclusion. It wasn’t all plain sailing. Just weeks after the JEP revealed a surge in violent attacks on teachers and school staff, Mr George recalls multiple instances of unruly behaviour and violence against teachers, himself included, over his tenure at Janvrin. “I’ve had kids pummelling my stomach. We’ve had fire extinguishers thrown at us. Displays ripped up. I had my phone snatched and thrown in the toilet. I’ve had my bank cards thrown out of the window,” he said.
Mr George tells these stories with a smile, but does not minimise the effect that is has on the other pupils in the class. “You imagine coming into the office, and you think every three or four days, somebody is going to stand up and throw a chair at you, or shout, or swear, or have a fight. Every day you come into work, you’re anxious. You can’t concentrate.”
Or, indeed, the teachers involved, who – at many schools – are expected to continue to teach after being the victims of violence. Mr George said that at Janvrin he made a point of insisting that teachers at least had a break after an aggressive incident in the classroom. He believes that was one of the reasons that staff retention at the school was relatively high.
“If you have just been assaulted, then your adrenaline is up, and it will be for some time. You take the child out of the classroom but you expect the teacher to just carry on teaching long division to 25 children in a calm, collected way. And 99% of the time, staff would do it.
“But we would insist that staff had a half day, or a day, or at least went to get a cup of tea.”
Personally, he says, dealing with violence and aggression was all about remembering that, ultimately, the child was also a victim.
“It’s always anxiety based. It’s all to do either with unassessed – and sometimes unknown – physiological or neurological things, or sensory needs that the child might have. It can also be related to traumas. The aggression and the assaults that teachers faced were a non-verbal communication of that child’s trauma and anxiety or neurological needs.
“I would look at some of these children who present the biggest challenges and try to understand the context. I said this time and time again – and my staff would say the same thing: we couldn’t walk in that child’s shoes for a day; we couldn’t do what some of those children had to do to turn up at school and cope. What they did was incredible. All credit to them.”
In understanding why the challenges appear to be increasing so rapidly and getting worse in recent years, Mr George suggests a number of factors. A cost-of-living crisis is making life more difficult for parents, while for older primary school-age children the impact and stresses of Covid-19 lockdowns are clearly still being felt. Mobile phones, too, are an issue: “I would say to parents: take those phones and burn them, bury them,” he says. “Don’t let them have a phone.”
And then there is the £2 million elephant in the room: funding.
Mr George’s pastoral-care team, specialist staff and facilities for students with needs, even the bowls of fruit that he had placed in classrooms at Janvrin because kids were coming to school hungry – all have a price.
“All this costs money,” he says. “That is exactly the point: we don’t have enough money.”
Like teachers who have spoken to the JEP in recent weeks, Mr George pushes back on the idea that huge deficits are the result of profligate spending on the part of head teachers: “I was at Janvrin from 2012 and in that time there were desks in there that were the original desks from 1997. We could never afford new desks for the school. It took me 12 years,” he says.
When it comes to the cost of special needs, Mr George says that the role of educational psychologists (EPs) is key. In November, the JEP reported how Jersey was branded an “unsafe” place to work for EPs due to a failure by the government to deal appropriately with their concerns. It is EPs who assess children to see if they qualify for extra funding for special needs.
“The whole system of inclusive education at CYPES is based on EPs. They hold the key to everything. Their assessments and their recommendations unlock the doors to all future funding,” Mr George says, adding that in his time at Janvrin he had had three or four periods where there was no EP at the school for a term or longer. “By that time, there is a backlog that I can never recover. I can never get that time back.”
Even when an EP is available and suggests that a child with special needs should be put in one of the Island’s specialist schools, those schools often do not have space, he says.
“I say, ‘What should I do?’ and they say, ‘Well, you need to keep the child. Here’s some transition money’. But that money is no good to me. You may as well give me a pair of socks. I can’t hire a specialist member of staff on a short-term contract. The recruitment process alone would take me months.”
And it is getting worse, he said. “There is a tsunami of children waiting to see EPs in Island schools.”
Unlike some teachers who have spoken to the JEP in recent weeks, Mr George does not put all of the blame at the foot of the man running the ship, Education Minister Robert Ward. “I’ve got a lot of time for Rob. I think he gets it.” But he does believe there needs to be a serious discussion in the Island about its priorities when it comes to spending public money.
“Are we investing enough? Because I suggest we don’t. We really don’t. We can spend a million pounds on maintaining the Aquasplash – and OK, a swimming pool is important – but you can buy a lot of educational resources and staffing with a million pounds,” he claimed.
It is views like that – and the willingness to say them – that has given Mr George a bit of a reputation as street fighter when it comes to the Island’s education system. “I had a reputation for causing trouble up at the department, because I would fight and fight. We shouldn’t have to fight for things for children, but I did fight,” he said,
adding that he knew people in the department would get annoyed with his approach.
“I got shouted at down the phone and in meetings and stuff like that. But it was a good fight, and, you know what? I’m glad I did it. I think sometimes it helped.
“And if you didn’t fight the cause for the child, who else is going to do it?”
