The other day, I found myself in two conversations about funding cuts. The first was with a businessman, let’s call him Mark, who works in public policy. The other was with a woman, call her Sarah, who is the manager of a small education charity, juggling funding, staff and volunteers. Both of them started with the same topic – the shortage of funding – but they came at it from very different directions.
Mark spoke confidently and with authority. “Cuts in public services have barely started yet,” he said. “Already Welsh Government spends 53% of its budget on health, and that is going to increase as our population ages. There will be less and less funding for education in future. So we have to act strategically and set organizational priorities carefully. We need education that will lead to behaviour change, so that we can face global challenges.”
For Sarah, spending cuts are an obstacle and a burden. “There’s so much I’d like to do, but I spend all my time just keeping things going. I don’t want my staff to lose their jobs. And we’re all so busy with our day-to-day responsibilities that we can’t do anything extra. It’s really tough.” She sounded despondent, as if there was no point discussing anything else.
How come the same story – that funding for education is in short supply – showed up as an invigorating challenge for Mark, and an energy drain for Sarah? Maybe she is failing to see the strategic vision and needs to get a grip. Or could it be that while high-level strategy is fun for the people who think it up, it leaves everyone else feeling that they should just be grateful to have a job at all?
Rather than fight over who decides the strategy, it might be better to question the story itself. Since public funding cuts are an unquestionable fact – although, mysteriously, money can always be found for a project that is sufficiently exciting – that means looking at money. Because money is just a story, albeit a very convincing one, invented to allow goods and services to be traded. It enables our society to function, and naturally it holds great significance for us. But it isn’t the same thing as wealth.
Money isn’t real in the way that the soil, rainfall, wildlife, food and our families are. It only approximates to these embodied realities, and often not even that. When it’s cheaper to buy unhealthy food made in energy-guzzling factories by low-paid workers, using produce from farms that are mining the soil for fertility, polluting waterways and displacing wildlife from their habitats, money is clearly pointing in the wrong direction. And the fact that a banker may be paid so much more than a nurse or a teacher is another way that money distorts our vision.
Setting money as the compass point by which we navigate the turbulent waters of climate breakdown and biodiversity loss, therefore, is clearly not a good idea. It’s time to get into a new relationship with it. We need to see market forces and public spending decisions as hazards to be challenged and negotiated, rather than as road signs to be obeyed (to mix the metaphor). We need to control the story, so the story doesn’t control us.
Not only that, but we actually have plenty of money in the UK. We are one of the world’s richest economies. Public funding cuts are not about money being scarce, they are about injustice and power imbalance, and must be tackled on those terms. There is nothing good, even for the economy, in closing hospitals or having large numbers of people unable to buy healthy food. It is all a matter of how the money is shared out, and who decides.
So where do that leave us, if we work in education? I think we need to teach young people – and ourselves – the difference between money and wealth. We need to point to the riches that really matter: healthy soils, human creativity, wildlife, beauty, kindness, community ties and culture. We need to stop talking about scarcity and competition, and instead celebrate abundance and collaboration.
If it takes public spending cuts to focus our minds in this way then, for all their dishonesty and injustice, they can be transformed into a positive force. They are in fact giving us a choice: we can fight over dwindling sources of money, jockeying for power, or we can reassess our values and ask ourselves how we really want to live. From there, we can create a better world.
There will of course be real hardships. Job losses and service cuts hurt, and we will must fight them wherever we can. But we can take courage from the fact that we are on the right path and that we have each other. And if any one sector is to bear the brunt of spending cuts, surely we the educators, who work with ideas, are the ones best placed to make positive meaning for everyone else.
Mark and Sarah both hold pieces of a bigger picture. Yes, spending cuts can force us to be strategic and change our behaviours, and yes too, it is right to be unhappy about them because that is a sign that we are being told something that isn’t true, and we need to go deeper into that discomfort and come up with a better story.
Finding Our Power 