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

The government has scored a "spectacular own goal" with the funding problems facing schools, says a newly-elected teachers' union leader.

Mary Bousted, the new general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, said that education ministers had to tackle the school budget shortages as a matter of urgency.

Bousted, a former secondary teacher, was head of the education school at Kingston University

And she warned that teachers were not reassured by the "promise that there might be jam tomorrow" and that ministerial claims about missing millions still held by local authorities were "simply not good enough".

"They need to know what they are going to get in total funding in one clear accountable statement."

Dr Bousted, having heard the concerns of teachers in local authorities which claim to face budget cuts, promised that she would "seek out the reason for this crisis and make good the losses".

Schools should never have been in a position where they had to consider making staff redundant, she told the conference.

The School Standards Minister, David Miliband, faced a hostile reception from delegates when he sought to downplay claims that there many schools with reduced budgets which were considering redundancies.

Dr Bousted, in her first address as general secretary, also highlighted the financial problems facing students training to become teachers.

Many teachers were entering teaching with an annual starting salary that was less than their debts, she says. And she warned that the government's ambition to recruit an extra 10,000 teachers could be adversely affected by such debts.