By Sean Coughlan BBC News Online at the ATL conference in Blackpool

Andy Ballard says schools face making people redundant

"It makes me very angry to see the claims from the government about increasing spending in schools," says Andy Ballard, who represents teachers in Somerset.

"I wonder what games are they playing? There have been budget inequalities in school funding and now there are budget shortfalls," says this teacher, now working as an Association of Teachers and Lecturers' official.

"We're about to embark on a recruitment campaign for classroom assistants - but the money is simply not coming through."

According to Mr Ballard, schools in Somerset are facing 40 or 50 redundancies because of this year's budget problems - with this process having already begun in some schools.

Instead of redundancies, he says that schools in the authority should be recruiting more than 100 extra staff.

And he says that this must be confusing for parents who are used to hearing about record levels of investment from a government that has made education a priority.

In simple terms, he believes that the government has got its sums wrong on the amount of money needed for its own school reforms, including higher salaries for teachers.

Cash shortage

For instance, he says that a local secondary school has 43 staff eligible to move to a higher pay scale - presenting an impossible financial burden on a school.

"There are some very serious problems with the costing of pay reforms and an underestimate of the money needed," says Mr Ballard.

This has been compounded by increases for national insurance and pension contributions and the variable outcome of changes to funding arrangements.

The result has been to increase costs at a faster rate than the growth in schools budgets, he says. And the effects are being failed in many ways.

Apart from the threat to teaching posts, he gives the example of another school in the county where money being saved for a new canteen has now had to be ploughed into short-term demands for cash.

There are also costs resulting from earlier government initiatives, where staff were hired as a result of matched-funding or specific grants and whose posts are now adding to the salary bill for schools and local authorities.

"I'd like David Miliband to say 'We've got it wrong' and agree to a complete review," he said.