MEMO to education chiefs: parents would like to see less politics and more applied mathematics. Not in the classroom, but in Whitehall and town hall.

Our education service is in a muddle. It might even be in a crisis, but that depends on who you listen to and which set of figures you believe.

A report to City of York Council now suggests that the funding shortfall for secondary schools is £75,000. That is five times greater than stated a month ago.

The massive disparity is put down to various financial changes that had not been factored in before. Yet if a company had got its sums so wrong, shareholders would be demanding action in the boardroom.

The local education authority has not been helped by a Government which keeps moving the funding goalposts. One minute Education Secretary Charles Clarke is trumpeting an 11.6 per cent increase in spending; the next, he is telling schools to raid their repairs budget to pay for staff and books.

At the same time, however, headteachers warned three weeks ago that there would be 3,000 job losses from schools nationally. By last week about 230 redundancies due to budget cuts had been confirmed. Is there a tendency to exaggerate the scale of the problem for political reasons?

We would also like to know precisely how many teachers have been made redundant in York: this information should be available as the education authority had to inform the staff concerned by May 31.

Parents have had enough of the blame and counter-blame culture. They want practical action now to safeguard their children's education. Fewer teachers and classroom assistants, less money for books and other resources: this is not what we expected for our higher taxes.

It is time politicians at local and national level stopped sniping, sat down together and mapped out a stable, well-funded school system. That was what voters were promised six years ago, after all.

Updated: 11:35 Tuesday, June 10, 2003