‘They wanted a standing order of £30’: how parents are funding state schools

When Emily Cleary’s son started secondary school two years ago, she couldn’t quite believe it when a member of staff announced that parents who wanted to donate to the school could set up a standing order for £30 a month. “They said they wanted to renovate the canteen and buy additional resources and equipment for the children,” Cleary, 48, tells The i Paper. “But it felt a bit pushy. I knew I wasn’t signing up for five years.” Although Cleary, a personal trainer in Buckinghamshire, didn’t sign up to donate at the induction, she continued to receive weekly requests to set up a standing order in the school newsletter. “It made me feel like I wasn’t pulling my weight,” she says. “Like I wasn’t doing what was expected of me and that I was depriving my child of what they should have. It was a guilt trip.” However, receiving requests for money from schools was nothing new. The primary school Cleary’s two children attended had also regularly asked parents for donations, although not quite as directly as requesting a standing order. “When they were in primary school, I did think that we were being asked for a lot of things,” she recalls. She estimates she spent hundreds of pounds on each child every year, paying for school trips, Easter egg hunts, raffles, school performances, supplies the school couldn’t afford, contributions to an all-weather play area, a new library, a minibus and more. “It gets out of hand,” she explains. The guilt and sense of inadequacy she felt when she couldn’t afford everything the school requested often ate away at her.Non-fee paying schools asking for parent funding is not without precedence. It was recently reported that Burnham Grammar, near Slough, was asking parents to donate the cost of a weekly latte into the school coffers to pay for a 3D printer and pottery kiln. Long gone are the days when parents just moaned about shelling out for uniform and a geography field trip – now it seems like parent money is fueling everyday necessities and nice-to-haves. Funding gap A 2025 Parent Voice Project survey of over 6,000 parents found that two-fifths of parents are being asked to contribute to day-to-day running costs of schools. Just under one-fifths said this had happened on multiple occasions. Research from Child Poverty Action Group and the Centre for Research in Social Policy found that parents pay at least £1,000 each year to send a child to state primary school in the UK and nearly £2,300 each year to secondary school – a jump in costs of 16 per cent and 30 per cent respectively since 2022, far outstripping both inflation (8 per cent) and earnings growth (12 per cent) during the same period. The reasons behind these stark rises include food during the school day (lunchtime and snacks), an increased need for electronic devices like tablets, phones, or laptops and, for secondary school pupils, higher costs for vital learning aides that school doesn’t provide such as art and design materials, textbooks and stationery. “Schools clearly can’t provide what they want to without the extra help,” says Cleary, who joined the Parent Teacher Association (PTA) at her children’s primary school and remembers feeling uncomfortable asking other parents for donations. She began questioning where the line should be drawn between what was an extra and what was essential and was left with no doubt who was responsible: “I blame the government for the past 20 years for systematically stripping away all funding.” The austerity years State schools in England have faced significant financial pressures over the past decade and a half, leaving many struggling to maintain the provision they would like to offer. There was a decline in school funding following the Conservative-led coalition government’s arrival in 2010, as public spending was reigned in as part of efforts to reduce the deficit after the global financial crisis. Research by Unison found that government cuts to schools meant pupils in England who started reception in 2010 each lost out on £5,384 in education funding by the time they graduated from sixth form in 2023. “Schools experienced a real-terms funding squeeze of around 10 per cent per pupil in the decade to 2020,” Jon Andrews, head of analysis and director for school system and performance at the Education Policy Institute (EPI), told The i Paper. The consequences of sustained financial pressure have been felt across schools, with larger class sizes, fewer support staff, reduced access to pupil support services, cuts to the curriculum and extracurricular activities, and less support for children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND). All of this risks affecting the quality of education and opportunities available to children. “While there has been significant investment since then, we are only just returning to the levels we saw in 2010,” Andrews says. He described last year’s Spending Review settlement for schools as “ultimately tight”, with the core schools budget being held “broadly flat in real terms”. In July 2026, the Government announced an additional £700m, rising to £1.1bn from 2027–28, to help schools meet higher-than-expected teacher pay costs. As a result, the schools budget is now expected to grow by two per cent in real terms between 2025–26 and 2028–29. However, this remains a relatively modest increase in overall purchasing power and does not necessarily mean individual schools will feel financially better off. A growing divide For parents, the consequences of school funding pressures go beyond requests for donations. Ruthie Collins, whose son attends a comprehensive school in Norfolk, fears that the underfunding of state schools will contribute to growing inequality in Britain. “Education is one of the biggest invisible class divides in Britain that hardly ever gets talked about,” she told The i Paper. “There’s huge inequality between private and state education in Britain.” Her son’s school has had to close its library and has never offered swimming lessons – something she suspects is due to budget shortfalls. For her, the loss of these opportunities is a symptom of a much wider problem. If state schools continue to struggle financially, she fears the gap between children attending them and those at privately funded schools will only widen: “Education should help bridge the gap, not exacerbate it.” It is against this backdrop of financial pressure that some schools are increasingly turning to parents and their communities for additional support. Whiteman says many school PTAs do “incredible fundraising” on behalf of their schools, adding that this had become increasingly important as budgets came under pressure. Yet it’s still parents’ time behind the organisation of events and invariably parents’ money buying the Bonfire Nights biscuits and end-of-term disco tickets. But some parents feel the schools have got the balance right. Steven Webster, 48, is a dad to a nine-year-old son in Bristol. His son’s state school has a “Friends Of” group who raise money for the school using events throughout the year, which he says “creates a community where you can meet staff, parents and pupils, get to know the school better, feel like you’re contributing”. “I’m coming at this from the perspective of someone in a family with two incomes, one child and a comfortable life, so I’m well aware of my privilege,” he says. “But I’ve never felt pressured to donate to these events, and when it comes to paying for school trips, our school has always made it very clear that help is available for those who may struggle to afford it.”