GOVERNMENT budget squeezing has led to dozens of staff redundancies in schools, according to Surrey County Council.
£433,186 has been spent laying off 128 school teachers and staff members in Surrey over the last three years.
The figures, released to the Advertiser following a Freedom of Information request, show the highest payment to a single member of staff was £49,487.10.
Reacting to the figures, council spokeswoman Joy Ridley said: "We had nearly 400 schools at the start of 2011, and 128 redundancies is a relatively small amount compared with the total number of staff employed by all of those schools, averaging 42 per year and £3,400 per redundancy.
"There are many reasons why schools might have to make staff redundant, such as a school reorganisation or merger, internal reorganisations due to changes in school needs, falls in pupil numbers in individual schools and areas, or simply responding to budget pressures.
"The Government did not fund any inflation for schools from 2011/12 to 2014/15 and many will have needed to reduce support staff as a result."
Central Government funding is allocated to schools by the Department for Education (DfE) via Surrey County Council.
A Department for Education spokesman said: "We have protected the schools budget and we are giving an additional £350 million to schools in historically under-funded areas.
"As part of this, Surrey is due to receive nearly £25 million extra."
Chris Curtis, head teacher at St Bede's School in Redhill, said: "The situation at St Bede's, and it's very similar as far as I'm aware in all schools, is we get two main chunks of funding.
"One is for 11 to 16-year-old students and that comes from the Government via Surrey County Council, and we get a second chunk of funding at sixth form level from the Education Funding Agency.
"Now the situation is, for the last three years, our 11 to 16 funding from Surrey County Council has been cash frozen so we are basically getting exactly the same money for education as we did three years ago and inflation is real."
Mr Curtis added: "The workforce had a pay freeze for a while, but we had one per cent pay rises last September and the coming September, so our costs are increasing but our budgets do not.
"It's happening right across the public sector, I do not think there will be a school in Surrey immune to it. We are trying to handle that in a natural way.
"The Government says its [school budgets] been relatively protected and there's probably some truth in that but, in real terms, all schools have less money than they had four years ago."
Mr Curtis added that often people do not realise the size of a school in staffing terms, with 85 to 90 per cent of school funding allocated to covering staffing costs.
"We are a people business," he added.
The DfE spokesman had not clarified when or where this money would be allocated, as the Advertiser went to press on Wednesday.
