Donna Spicer stopped using her heating and her lights before the October half term. Instead, she relies on a mixture of blankets, candles, and hot water bottles to keep her home liveable. A veteran teaching assistant working in Greenwich, she’s trying to make ends meet on a wage around half of the median salary in the UK.

When we speak, Donna is keen to make it clear she’s not alone. ‘One of my colleagues got an estimate that her energy bill needs to go up to £800 a month,’ she says. ‘And as support staff, we only take home £1,400 a month, depending on your week’s work.’

96% of teaching assistants questioned for one report said their wages are not enough to cover their needs. The same study that found that 70% had already been considering leaving the job due to low pay last year—before the crushing impact of this year’s cost of living crisis had begun to be fully felt.

Then the new school year began, in the middle of the biggest living standards squeeze in a century. Low wages now go an even shorter distance than they did before, and coupled with long hours, unpaid overtime, and growing stress, a deepening exodus of teachers and support staff is pushing underfunded schools ever closer to breaking point.

‘We’ve seen around 40% of support staff leave the job [in our area] since July,’ says Mary Goodson, a teaching assistant of nearly thirty years and GMB trade union rep in Barnet. The average teaching assistant in her area can earn as little as £13,000 a year, according to currently listed job adverts, particularly if on term time-only contracts.

In Spicer’s borough, too, she says about 30% of support staff left over the summer, and those that remain aren’t finding it easy to plug the gaps. ‘They’re going off with stress at work all the time,’ she says. ‘I’ve got colleagues down the phone crying to me, saying, “I don’t want to go back to work. I can’t cope with it.” It’s dire—worse this year than in any year previously.’

Many of those who remain in role—often due to childcare demands that mean they can’t take on jobs that last outside school hours—have been forced to sell their cars, install pre-payment meters on their gas, or even, like Donna, make do with leaving the lights and heating off in their homes. Others are having to take on multiple roles in their schools—tripling up as cleaners and lunch attendants, as well as TAs—or second or third jobs in the evenings in hospitality or retail.

‘Jake Berry, the Conservative Party chair, said recently that people just need to go and get another job if they don’t like their pay,’ says Hannah Packham, the National Education Union’s regional organiser for the South West. ‘Well, we’re already seeing lots of education professionals leave, and now we’re facing a recruitment and retention crisis. I’ve been in more than one meeting where support staff have basically said, “I can earn more in Tesco.” And they’re right. It’s just not sustainable.’

The crisis is particularly acute among support staff, but problems of recruitment and retention are affecting the entirety of an under-resourced education system. Of teachers, who have faced a decline of more than 20% in real-terms pay in the last decade, almost one in ten left in 2020/21. One nationwide study suggested 44% are planning to quit within the next five years.

Michael Gurney’s workplace provides just one example. After starting the year with two vacant teaching posts in its science department, his Devon school has started setting single class ceilings on the number of pupils studying mainstream subjects at GCSE or A-Level because they don’t have enough teachers to cater to demand. ‘If you’re a science teacher especially, you can probably get a job in industry relatively easily,’ Gurney says, ‘which is going to pay a lot more per hour and be a lot less stress.’

Gurney adds that austerity, the pandemic, and the cost of living crisis have created the ‘perfect storm’ for instituting an exodus of education staff. The devastation that storm leaves in its wake is well-documented: multiple studies have shown the direct impact teaching assistants have not only on individual pupils but the class at large, while larger class sizes and the constant churn of more experienced teachers further lower educational outcomes.

Children with special educational needs or disabilities (SEND), in particular, are losing access to the one-to-one teaching assistants who are a vital pillar of their education. Goodson says in many schools in her area, children who would normally need a one-to-one to be able to properly engage with lessons have been left sharing with two or three other similarly in-need pupils, or even just relying on extra support from the teacher.

And this all comes at the worst possible time, in the wake of the pandemic, which led to the already large attainment gap between the poorest and wealthiest students growing by at least 16%. Exactly when more staff and resources are needed in the UK school system, less are there.

The root cause is no mystery. Austerity since 2010 has slashed away education budgets, in real terms by some £10 billion, reaching their worst level since the 1970s according to the IFS. Public sector workers have faced a deepening pay squeeze and successive governments have waged war on their ability to act in response—while growing poverty in the rest of the economy means more and more children coming to school ‘too hungry to learn’, putting new and broader pressures on teachers to provide different kinds of support.

For those Tribune spoke to, the fear is that the worst is yet to come. Both new chancellor Jeremy Hunt and new prime minister Rishi Sunak have signaled the government’s intention to embark on a fresh round of spending cuts, and if recent history is anything to go by, education will be in their sights.

Already, the proposed pay increase for teachers and support staff—5% and between 4 and 10.5%, respectively, and in all cases a real-terms cut—has come without full government funding attached, meaning it would be funded by headteachers cutting back other services. It’s no surprise that a recent consultative ballot showed 86% of teachers and 78% of support staff in the NEU are willing to strike—with other ballots of education workers also taking place.

Growing numbers of education staff concerned about their own survival this winter are also concerned about the survival of the school system as a whole. If a strike does happen, as Michael puts it, it isn’t just about trying to get a funded pay rise; it’s about making sure there’s ‘an existing teaching workforce for the future.’ Education only exists if there are education staff there to make it happen. And while dedication to pupils goes a long way, those Tribune speak to are desperate to make clear that education staff have their limits—just like everyone else.