The following letter was sent to Justine Greening by Anita O’Sullivan, the Chair of Governors at St Andrews Catholic School, Solihull. She is yet to receive a response. 

Justine Greening, 

I am writing to you in the following capacity:

• Chair of governors of a one-form entry Catholic primary school
• No children of my own in state education
• A significant business background in commercial finance
• With a three-year track record of working hard with a Primary school to initiate all of the relevant cuts to bring the school budget back under control

We have achieved the following:

• We have done all of the work to make all of the possible cuts
• We have brought the school back to ‘Good’ in terms of Ofsted
• We have achieved the unachievable and taken full advantage of the goodwill and dedication of the staff and parents at the school as Government insists we need to
• We have given no pay increases and taken away all classroom assistants
• We no longer teach swimming or music as the budget won’t allow it
• We have outsourced all maintenance work to parents because we can’t afford work men

We are a living example of the devastation about to hit the education system even though we have made all of the cuts. I challenge anyone to come in and see how we could do it cheaper and maintain academic standards.

So my question to you is:

We have done everything possible and turned our school into the environment that you insist it should be.  This email is a formal invite to you Justine Greening.  I would like you to come to our school and make the decisions for us in terms of the next step. I would like you to tell us how we will make it work now we have done everything that has been asked of us.  

Ofsted told me that we don’t have a good management team. They said we have a brilliant management team. We are just about to lose one of the team because we can’t afford to keep him and we can’t promote the other to head because she isn’t a Catholic. We are now being forced to incur more cost after we have worked so hard to reduce it. 

I have tried every office and stepping stone before sending this email and all parties tell me that they are not responsible. I have seen my MP (Julian Knight) and that was a total waste of time. If you tell me the same, do I need to invite Theresa May? 

I want you to come and see what we have done and tell me so I can tell the staff children and parents what more you expect from us. I don’t get paid to do this job but I do work hard for it. I have only one objective and that is the good of the children. I want you to come to our school and tell me that you have the same objective.

I literally want someone from Parliament to come and tell me what we can do before this gets any worse. 

Anita O’Sullivan,

Chair of governors,

St Andrew’s Catholic Primary School,

Solihull

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