A SECONDARY school has been forced to start charging for its counselling services due to funding pressures.

Notley High School sent a letter to parents advising them that they would no longer be able to provide the service free of charge to pupils from September.

The school currently employs three part-time counsellors who work with both staff and students.

Headteacher David Conway said: “As funding gets tighter and tighter we have to ensure that we protect our frontline services.

“We have to take something out of the budget – something has to give.

“We do believe this is an important resource for us and in order to keep it running in the future we will have to ask for a contribution from parents. It will still be quite heavily subsidised by the school.”

It was announced on Monday that an additional £1.3billion would be allocated by the Department for Education to the core schools budget over the next two years.

However Mr Conway said that this will still leave schools short of funds and he has no idea how much of the funding Notley High School will receive.

He said: “We have actually reduced our budget by £500,000 even though there are cost pressures involved in things like staff salary increases that are statutory.

“Even after the announcement, the Institute of Fiscal Studies still says that real-terms schools funding will go down by 0.5 percent from 2 percent before the announcement.

“The money will not come through until April next year and our decisions about what services we can provide need to be made before September.”

Simon Mason, headteacher of Honywood Community Science School, Coggeshall, has been part of a countrywide campaign calling for a review of schools funding.

He said: “In essence, the announcement amounts to a real-terms freeze to the per pupil budget between 2017-18 and 2019-20 but does nothing to address the cuts in funding which have already taken place. It is, therefore, not the answer to our campaign.”