We were entirely unaware that there was some impending collapse in the education budget of the country. So imagine our surprise when we hear that budgets are to be cut by 8%. We're really sure we would have heard about it if it were true.

But we're told it is true in the pages of The Guardian no less:

But what does “winning” mean when school budgets are facing real-term cuts of £3bn by 2020? This is what the National Audit Office, rather annoyingly for Greening, announced on the same day she unveiled the new formula. All schools will need to reduce funding per pupil by 8% over the next four years as a result of teacher pay rises, pension contributions and national insurance.

Err, wait a minute here, paying teachers, and pensions and national insurance are part of total compensation, is part of the education budget. And thus part of the funding per pupil of course. Thus there is no real terms cut here. Can't we ask the Guardian to stop spreading fake news like this?

And of course there's the other point here, the relevance of this to such things as minimum wage rises. A reallocation of current budgets from non-wage activities to wages does indeed mean, in the absence of pay rises or firing people, that there is less money available for those non-wage activities. Thus is we raise the wages of sandwich makers, just as with teachers, we either get fewer sandwich makers, more expensive sandwiches, or less money to spend on hte ingredients of the sandwich.

Puzzling that this isn't pointed out in The Guardian's discussions of the minimum wage really. But then we guess that's the fake news business.