A dramatic drop in the county’s school budget reserves - from over £1.1m in 2015/16 to just under £270,000 in 2016/17 - is likely to force more cost-cutting or significant staff redundancies, MCC’s Labour group leader has claimed.

County Councillor Dimitri Batrouni says the drop of nearly £900,000 came to light in the Revenue and Capital Monitoring Report presented to MCC’s Cabinet on June 7.

It’s the lowest reserve in the schools budget for five years.

“Schools have had no option but to top up their budgets from the reserves and now they will be made to balance their books,” he said.

“It’s a situation that’s likely to affect all the secondary and primary schools in the county.

“I’m looking for some answers at next week’s full council meeting - how many schools are planning to make redundancies this academic year, for example, and how many teaching assistants have been lost since 2012.”

Councillor Batrouni believes the problem lies in the fact that the schools have been receiving funding which hasn’t allowed for inflation - effectively a year-on-year cut - ‘and now it’s all come home to roost’.

A spokesperson for MCC told the Chronicle, “As part of the challenging financial situation across the whole public sector, schools are working hard to ensure that they operate within the resources available.

“In the last year this has seen a call on reserves. Monmouthshire is working closely with all our schools to ensure that they are financially resilient and sustainable and focused on the best outcomes for our children set against a period of significant change and reform across all of Wales.”

Councillor Batrouni responded, “This is a typically vacuous and insulting response from the Conservative-controlled council.

“Our children do not deserve and their parents do not expect overworked teachers in understaffed schools.

“Monmouthshire’s Conservatives have deliberately cut local school budgets by £3.2m over the last few years.

“I have repeatedly voiced my opposition to these cuts and every year the Labour group have voted against the Tory’s desire to cut local school budgets.

“Our great concern is that staff will bear the brunt of these cuts, especially teaching assistants.

“The Tories are piling the pressure on our hardworking and dedicated teaching and non-teaching staff. They do not understand the pain their cuts are causing schools.”

The breakdown of the figures in the report showed:

Financial Year-end Net level of School Balances

2011-12 (£965k)

2012-13 (£1.24m)

2013-14 (£988k)

2014-15 (£1.140m)

2015-16 (£1,156m)

2016-17 (£269k).

The report said that Fairer Funding Regulations adopted by councils and governing bodies commonly precluded governing bodies from ‘planning for a deficit position’ but this was changed last year in MCC ‘to allow licensed deficits where a recovery plan is agreed and followed’.

This flexibility - ‘which is now pretty much exhausted’ - only extended as far as there being a collective schools reserve surplus i.e there is an arrangement in place whereby schools are allowed to plan for a deficit budget funded by a collective surplus of school balances held by the authority on behalf of schools.

“It remains unlikely that the collective level of reserves will sustain the traditional annual draw by schools on reserves in recent years, which will add additional focus to addressing the need to remain within budget in 2017/18,” it said.