THE county’s school music service will end by August unless its growing six-figure funding gap can be covered by a new way of working.

Options for the future of the service and the lessons it provides include a big rise in the hourly teaching rate charged to schools, an overhaul of pay and conditions for staff, or even contracting out.

The fate of the service could well lie with the Schools Forum due to meet on Wednesday – a forum which has rejected requests for help over the service’s finances before.

A recent external assessment of the service referred to its “increasingly unviable”

position given the instability of its finances and the resistance of schools to increased charges.

This latest crises for the service comes as the council considers £1.6 million worth of cuts to schools funding overall.

A council report warns that a combination of the cuts and the sizeable deficit mean any changes to ensure the service’s survival will almost certainly include an “entirely new”

business model.

At present, the deficit is expected to top £240,000 by next month alone. The report identifies the gap between staff pay and income generation as the biggest cause of that.

Though the service receives its full Standards Fund for Music amount of £219,000 a year, this doesn’t account for inflation, meaning a real-terms reduction of around three per cent a year.

For six years up to March 2007, the council gave additional funding averaging £150,000 a year. This ended in March 2008 resulting in an immediate deficit of £123,000.

An increase in the hourly charge to schools from £27 an hour to £32 an hour was rejected by the Schools Forum in 2009 as being too expensive.

Several high schools also indicated that they would withdraw from the music service if it went through.

Later that year, the forum also rejected a one-off payment of £100,000 to help with the deficit.

Measures to keep costs down range from removing an entire middle management team of co-ordinators – saving around £70,000 a year – to the sale of surplus instruments raising £30,000.

The worst case scenario put to the forum sees the service closed, with instrumental lessons ending from July and all other provision in August. All 59 staff, including 53 teachers, would be made redundant.

Survival options other than raising charges see teachers effectively becoming self-employed and at the whim of schools choosing to work with them, the privatisation of the service, or the Schools Forum agreeing to pay off the accumulated deficit – a solution which would still need a new business model.