Jack Dyson

Jack Dyson is a senior reporter at Schools Week who focuses on the financial health of schools, academy trusts and the systems that fund them. His coverage follows the money through deficits, reserves and funding decisions, turning complex balance sheets into clear stories about risk for schools and pupils. He brings an investigative background in uncovering hidden markets and regulatory gaps to a beat that treats school finance as the main story rather than a technical backdrop.

School deficits and budget pressure

Dyson’s reporting tracks how rising deficits shape life in council-run schools and their governing boards. In one investigation he identifies dozens of maintained schools with deficits of more than £1 million and documents a more than 70 per cent rise in schools in the red across 65 local authorities in three years.

He reports that some schools are charged six-figure interest by councils on their losses, showing how deficit management adds a further cost layer to already stretched budgets. His stories follow these pressures into governance, including boards pressing Ofsted to ensure SEND funding is used for pupils rather than to patch wider budget holes.

He connects headline deficit figures with operational detail, such as councils pulling intervention cash for struggling schools because of their own financial positions. In coverage of Kent County Council, he highlights a £200 million SEND budget deficit and shows how the council shifts the cost of support onto schools, including removing funding for targeted help.

Across these pieces, he treats deficit data, interest charges and pulled support as linked elements of the same financial squeeze rather than isolated incidents.

Academy trusts, reserves and funding policy

Dyson reports closely on how academy trusts manage reserves and prepare for future financial shocks. In analysis of trust accounts he shows chains improving their financial positions while leaders still brace for difficult years ahead, with many schools remaining in deficit despite stronger top-line reserves.

He uses this to frame trusts’ behaviour as “shoring up” funds for rainy days, setting up a contrast between healthier central balance sheets and persistent pressure at school level.

He links trust finance to national funding decisions, including the extension of free school meal eligibility to families on universal credit. In that work he calculates that the policy leaves schools tens of millions of pounds out of pocket, joining welfare reform directly to school budget gaps. On the pensions side of his beat he covers government moves that affect schools’ contributions to teachers’ pensions, treating changes in contribution rates as another lever on school finances rather than a niche staffing issue.

The result is a body of work where trusts’ reserves, school-level deficits, welfare policy and pension contributions sit in one connected financial narrative.

SEND and local authority finance

A significant strand of Dyson’s reporting centres on SEND funding deficits and their impact on both councils and schools. He has covered a £20 billion SEND “timebomb” being brought onto the public balance sheet, setting out the scale of liabilities that government can no longer keep off the books. In that analysis he reports that councils face a £14 billion black hole in SEND funding deficits by 2028, with government also needing billions each year to run the system itself.

His stories make clear that these numbers are not abstract, but sit behind decisions on which support can be offered and who pays for it.

Dyson links those national figures to local decisions, such as councils withdrawing central support and requiring schools to fund their own help for children with additional needs. He shows how SEND deficits drive wider cuts, including the loss of intervention funding for schools, and how governing boards respond by pushing regulators to protect ringfenced SEND money.

Across this strand of coverage he treats SEND finance as a structural risk for the education system, not a niche sub-budget, and uses precise deficit and cost figures to show the size of the challenge.

Investigative background and reporting style

Dyson joined Schools Week in April 2023 as a senior reporter with a particular focus on the academy sector. Before moving onto the education beat he spent more than five years at KentOnline, where he uncovered a £100 million black market on Canterbury’s high street, failings in the gambling industry and rogue Airbnb owners breaking Covid restrictions for profit. His earlier investigations earned him joint young journalist of the year at the 2019 Regional Press Awards and recognition as Kent print and feature journalist of the year.

That background shapes how he approaches finance stories at Schools Week. He favours investigations and exclusives built around data, using detailed figures from councils, trusts and school accounts to demonstrate the real-world impact of funding decisions. His pieces often carry strong topline findings - such as the number of schools more than £1 million in deficit or the billions now recorded on the SEND balance sheet - and then work down into how those numbers translate into withdrawn support, interest charges and staffing pressures. Communications teams can expect him to probe for hard numbers, question how decisions move risk between councils, trusts and individual schools, and return to stories as the financial picture develops over time.