SUPPORT staff at a Southend school are facing redundancy over funding cuts of almost £500,000.

Union GMB has arranged an urgent meeting at Chase High School, in Prittlewell Chase, Westcliff, to discuss the loss of 15 members of staff. It comes as the schools faces a £422,000 budget shortfall following a shake-up of Government funding.

The Echo launched a campaign last week to fight the cuts. Under the proposed new National Funding Formula every school across south Essex is facing huge losses.

Headteachers and unions warned the first to suffer under the cuts would be support staff, who provide a wide range of additional help to teachers.

Chase High School is set to lose one of its two counsellors, one of four supervisors, ten of its 12 learning support assistants, one of two PAs to the headteacher and its only music and drama technician.

In April 2015 the school, which is working hard to raise standards, had the equivalent of 104 full-time teacher. This has since been trimmed to 87.

The GMB union, which represents the support staff, has called a meeting at the school tomorrow.

Daren Parmenter, GMB regional organiser said: “To have a school allocated nearly half a million pounds less for the next financial year is appalling.

“Schools are already running on the goodwill of staff, with 73 per cent of support staff working many hours for no extra pay and undertaking many job roles which are not part of their job description for no extra pay.”

Mr Parmenter added: “Staff do this because of their amazing goodwill just to keep the school functioning to a good standard because they care about the children they work with.

“After speaking to teachers they have told me this school will not function to the standards it has experienced for many years. The support staff are a vital and integral part of our educational system and the pupils will be at a massive detriment without them.”

Andrew James, headteacher of Chase High School, said: “We recently received a statement from the government showing that we will receive £422,000 less next year than we received this year. “Prudent budgeting since April 2015 has allowed us to reduce expenditure considerably over those two years but this new deficit can only be addressed through cuts to the staffing budget.

“I am not pleased to be in the position in which I am having to make redundancies but we have no choice.”

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