IT IS a sign of the state of Tory Britain in 2022 that 90 per cent of schools will face a real-terms cut to their budget next year.

Per pupil funding will suffer a real-terms cut of £147. For a school of 1,500 students, this equates to losing over £200,000 annually.

On top of historic real-terms cuts, which have seen school spending power reduced by £1.3bn, or 2.9 per cent, since 2015-16, this will have a disastrous effect on our children’s education.

Already, the media is full of stories of schools considering staff cuts, larger class sizes and reduced timetables.

Those schools worst hit by the current round of cuts are those which have been historically underfunded, meaning that our most disadvantaged children are facing the most savage cuts to their education.

This comes at a time when child poverty is on the rise. The latest figures showing that 3.9 million children live in poverty in the UK, more than a quarter of all children.

These are not just statistics. These are children who arrive at school hungry, whose parents skip meals so they can afford to feed them.

And poverty has a generational impact. In 2015, 33 per cent of children receiving free school meals obtained five or more A-C GCSEs, compared with 61 per cent of other children.

Hungry children cannot focus on learning and no amount of catch-up programmes and phonics schemes can change this.

The impact on these children’s education will affect most of them for the rest of their lives.

Now, schools trying to respond to the scale of this crisis will have their budgets slashed, impacting not only on education but on their capacity to run breakfast clubs, to subsidise school uniforms and to provide home learning resources.

This is an attack on working-class children by a right-wing government of the super-rich.

The majority of children living in poverty are in families where at least one parent is working, exposing low pay as the root cause of child poverty.

The fact is that tackling child poverty means taking on the corporations that pay poverty wages, the government departments whose staff have to claim the benefits they administer and the penny-pinchers slashing school funding.

It means engaging in the fight for decent pay and reversing the massive transfer of wealth from the working class to the super-rich that we have seen over the past 40 years, under both Conservative and Labour governments.

To do this we must co-ordinate our industrial action, fighting together with rail workers, postal workers, civil servants, university lecturers, nurses and all those willing to stand up and fight back.

We need to build a movement for a new deal for workers and working-class families, uniting with organisations like the People’s Assembly and Enough is Enough.

For educators, the most significant thing they can do right now is vote Yes to take action over pay and school funding.

We have an unprecedented alliance of education unions uniting to take on the government.

The National Education Union, NASUWT and National Association of Head Teachers, with ballots already under way, have been joined by the Association of School and College Leaders, which is now consulting on industrial action.

They will follow the UCU university union and EIS Scottish education union which have both recently declared successful ballots for action, with 96 per cent of EIS members voting for action on a 71 per cent turnout — astounding results which show the strength of feeling and the growing confidence of the trade union movement.

Now is our moment — fight back and win!