More than 3000 teachers will lose their jobs because of the funding crisis in Britain's schools, according to a survey in the Times.

The paper also reports that thousands more on temporary contracts will be told next week that their schools cannot afford to keep them next term and many children will be sent home early.

Forum Response: Association of Teachers and Lecturers

Gerald Imison, joint acting general secretary of the ATL, told ePolitix.com: "The key to the funding crisis was identified by Charles Clarke in allowing schools to raid their capital budgets.

"It is simply that the new funding arrangements put inadequate cash into the system partly because key pressures were underestimated. It has now been demonstrated that many authorities have passported to schools more money than the government intended and budgets can still not be balanced.

"But whilst some schools have solved their crisis by diversion of funds, we must not forget that the capital budgets are there because of the legacy of crumbling schools, not as a general contingency.

"That money must be replaced urgently before we have to start alerting the Health and Safety Executive to the dangerous state of some of our schools. The government, in its election manifesto, pledged 10,000 extra teachers and 50,000 extra support staff, a promise repeated in the National Agreement on Workload. These promises are part of the underpinning resource package which enabled ATL to sign that agreement.

"The path to implementation is now decidedly rocky and redundancies amongst teaching and support staff will make it worse.

"There has to be an early and clear statement from the government that the funds next year will be sufficient to pay off this year's deficits, to replace lost capital budgets and to provide a sound base for future years.

"This must be coupled by changes to the funding methodology which puts sufficient money directly into schools in a wholly transparent way."

Forum Response: National Union of Teachers

Doug McAvoy, general secretary of the NUT, said: "Quite simply, the government has not provided sufficient money for our schools to avoid job losses and worsened conditions of employment.

"Teachers will take their half-term break wondering whether they will return to school to face redundancy notices for September.

"This is an appalling prospect which will demoralise staff across the land.

"I have written to Charles Clarke again urging that he provide additional funds for 2003-04. It is simply not good enough to blame the funding crisis on bureaucracy.

"The measures agreed between the education secretary and the signatories to the agreement are inadequate.

"Unless new funds are made available, government commitments to start reducing teacher workload will be in jeopardy as will thousands of teachers jobs."

Forum Response: Professional Association of Teachers

Jean Gemmell, general secretary of PAT, told ePolitix.com: "It is ridiculous that we have a situation where there is an acute shortage of teachers and support staff, yet school staff are threatened by redundancy.

"Schools, pupils and teachers need to concentrate on education and not be distracted by the threat of teacher redundancies and arguments over who is to blame.

"It is imperative that the solution to this funding debacle is found. The government and local authorities must ensure that schools receive the funding they need so we can see an end to this problem.

"The timing of all this is particularly unfortunate because the National Workload Agreement is being handicapped hugely by this present funding crisis and consequent lack of confidence in anticipated future funding. We should all be looking to success in the future and not worrying about survival in the present.

"My concern is that many of the LEAs will be able to answer Charles Clarke's questions about where the money is and still have huge discrepancies in the funding between individual schools within their LEAs.

"This is because what is not happening is an analysis of what the individual LEAs set as objective criteria when they give money to schools, and it is only the base rate per capita that is published in Charles Clarke's recently published chart.

"Over and above that, schools can have objective criteria applied to them which either do or don't give them extra money, so you can have additional monies on the grounds of how many children there are with free school meals, additional monies on the grounds of children's social and economic backgrounds, additional monies on the school size, additional monies on the school's staying-on rate, or on exam results - providing they are objective criteria, they comply with the government's rubric.

"However, they still can alter hugely in an LEA how much money any one school gets.

"The DfES and LEAs need to look in much more detail at the individual LMS (Local Management of Schools) schemes to find out why the discrepancies occur.

"Sir Jeremy Beecham, chair of the Local Government Association, actually said that 'local councils are not holding back £500 million'. All of this money will be spent on education during the coming year, as agreed between local councils and local school heads to meet local needs' - not in relation to the government's priorities.

"When the base rate of allocation per pupil is determined in an LEA, it's done over all the children in that LEA, and the base rate will go up depending on whether the number of children within the LEA has risen or fallen, not on whether or not the number of children in an individual school has risen or fallen.

"So it is perfectly possible, if the base rate per head of child has gone down, for a school that's got an increasing roll to still have less budget.

"Similarly, it is possible for a school with a decreasing roll to end up with more budget if each child becomes worth more money. That's not determined at school level, it's determined at council level."