Taking the time to meet with your MP is a powerful way to show them that you care passionately about school funding, and will encourage your MP to think deeply about how this issue impacts their constituents.
Engaging with your MP can be incredibly impactful and effective. The Chancellor listens to what MPs say, and will take notice if MPs are feeling under pressure from their constituents. Writing to your MP also allows you to educate them—enabling them to learn more about the issue and understanding how strongly their constituents feel about it.
Your MP will have political access and tools to influence Chancellor Rachel Reeves — they can write to the Chancellor, ask questions in parliament, speak up in debates, table a motion, and propose changes to bills. If they know that their constituents feel passionately about school funding and pushing back against these cuts, they’ll apply more pressure on the Chancellor to reverse her decision.
By getting prominent members of your local community to sign an open letter to the MPs in your town, you’ll be letting them know how strongly their constituents feel about reversing the new cuts.
You can organise your community to sign the open letter that asks the MPs to stand against the cuts put forward by the Chancellor. Here’s our step-by-step guide to do that:
1. Gathering a team
Building a core team is one of the most important parts of this process.
Your team will help you draft your letter, conduct outreach and publish the document. The more representative and diverse your team can be, the stronger your engagement will be.
Your team might include a headteacher, parent, teacher and support staff. Consider representation across gender, age, race, ethnicity, and disability.
Having a headteacher on your team will give your letter strength and legitimacy. Heads are tasked with managing the budget for their school, and are often the most exposed and aware of the challenges faced as a result of Government cuts over the past 14 years.
2. Draft your letter
Here’s your chance to draft a letter to your MPs. It’s an opportunity for you to share your experiences with school funding cuts; the impact that it’s had on your life or the lives of children, teachers, staff and parents from your school; and your hopes for the future.
You’ll want to get this published as an op-ed, so here are some tips and suggestions:
Aim to make it roughly 500-800 words in length.
Use a combination of storytelling, personal experiences, and facts about funding
Capture readers with a compelling first sentence, or open with a story
Use statistics, but put the figures in understandable terms for your readers. You can use numbers from schoolcuts.org.uk
Use local examples from your community, as that will resonate most with your readers
Some suggestions for things you can include:
Why reversing school cuts is important to you and your community
Your own observations and experiences with school cuts over the past fourteen years
The funding challenges that school staff and pupils face in your constituency
What restoring school funding would mean for your school or your family
Make sure you also list all the MPs for your town. To check the MPs for your town, use the Find your MP tool.
After drafting a powerful letter, you can move onto reaching out to prominent people in your community who can sign onto it. Try to get at least 10 people to sign onto it – and it’s great if you can find more!
With your team, make a list of people and organisations that you’ll reach out to, and assign who will reach out to them. Organisations and groups you could consider approaching include:
Heads and teachers in your local schools
Local councillors
Local businesses
Local branches of trade unions:
NEU
NAHT
ASCL
Sports centres or clubs
Faith leaders and organisations
Charities and service delivery organisations
Write to your MP
You can write to your MP using our handy tool. You’ll just need to enter your basic information and postal code, and we’ll find your MP and show you a letter that you can customise.
Have you seen this link to e-mail your MP about school funding?
After years of school cuts under the Conservatives, we expected change from the new Labour Government.
But Chancellor Reeves is forcing 76% of primary schools and 94% of secondary schools to make cuts this year.
This makes her the first Labour Chancellor since 1979 to force schools to make cuts. This is unacceptable. The Chancellor must reverse this misguided decision.
Our schools cannot make more cuts. Heads, teachers and school staff have done all they can – there are no more efficiencies to be made.
If they don’t turn back now, the Government will only deepen the crisis in our schools.
Together, we can tell the Chancellor: it’s time for our children’s education to be properly funded.
Your delegation could also directly engage with your MPs by meeting them and sharing your concerns. This is a powerful way to show them that you care passionately about school funding, and will encourage your MP to think deeply about how this issue impacts their constituents. Here’s what you can do to meet with your MP.
