For many years, my fascination with school funding formulae has been something of a lonely furrow, so it’s been odd to see it become a common topic of conversation at the school gate.

The combination of year-on-year budget cuts and the new national formula has created a huge amount of interest - and protest - around school spending. It may even feature prominently in June’s general election.

When I worked at the Department for Education, we tried several times to get a new national funding formula announced. The current system is nonsensical; the amounts schools are getting are based on a formula that was last updated 15 years ago when the country’s demographics were very different.

What’s more, over the years, little pots of money, announced in a flurry of media attention at one party conference or another, have been added here and there with little thought as to the overall picture.

Every time we put forward a proposal, though, we came up against a senior politician - Nick Clegg once, George Osborne another time - saying that while it made complete sense, it wasn’t a politically expedient time to mess around with school funding. Any change, they said, leads to the same problem: winners stay quiet and losers kick up a fuss. 

The irony of the current row is that the opposite has happened. Most of the “losers” are in urban areas and in particular London, where nearly all schools will see cuts as a result of the changes. But they’re staying relatively quiet, having anticipated a far worse outcome.

Fair philosophy could fall foul of headteachers

Meanwhile, schools in smaller towns and the shires, which expected this new formula to end decades-long grievances, have seen only modest gains. The Tory MPs who represent these schools have the power to kill the formula. (But, with this week’s announcement of a general election, this power is likely on the wane.)

It would be a shame if the proposals fell foul of headteachers or got lost after the national poll. The DfE has come up with a fair model that adjusts the balance between the big cities and everyone else while retaining a strong focus on extra funding for disadvantage. 

The real problem is the reduction in the pot of money available for schools. After seven years of incremental reductions, schools are now having to make the kind of cuts that really hurt. There are still efficiencies to be made, but reducing the photocopier bill won’t cover another three years of falling budgets.

The problems for the post-election government will be a funding crisis in the NHS and social care, as well as a hefty Brexit bill. This makes it unlikely that the DfE will be able to keep plans for a new funding formula alive by sticking a bit more money into the system.

I suspect the outcome will be a reversion to the old truth that it’s just too politically difficult to mess around with school funding. Hopefully whoever’s in charge of the DfE after 8 June will hold the line, or the chance for a fair funding system would be lost for at least another Parliament. 

Sam Freedman is executive director of programmes at Teach First and a former government policy adviser