You can ‘protect’ the education budget, but in this climate you can’t protect schools’ costs, argues Anna Feuchtwang

Even at the height of Osborne’s austerity, we were often told that schools and the NHS were safe.

Officially, these most sacred of our universal public services will be spared the knife, while other budgets are repeatedly slashed to bring down the deficit. But beneath the rhetoric, trouble has been brewing. The truth is that protecting one or two budgets while cutting others to the bone doesn’t yield quite the results the government intended.

The spat between NHS England chief Simon Stevens and Theresa May earlier this year over health funding illustrates how cuts to social care have forced the NHS to pick up the pieces. At the heart of the dispute was how much extra money was needed by the NHS to continue doing its job.

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