Budgets will be the battleground.

Byline: By Graeme Whitfield 

A North-East woman elected to lead the country's headteachers has vowed to fight the Government over school budgets.

Anne Welsh, who is head at George Stephenson High School in Killingworth, North Tyneside, said that easing the budget shortfalls suffered by many schools in the North-East will be her priority when she takes over as president of the Secondary Heads Association.

Mrs Welsh, 54, a mother-of-two who lives in Gosforth, Newcastle, is taking a year's secondment from her school to act as the association's president, beginning in September.

Speaking to The Journal yesterday, she said that many schools would be unable to fulfil new contracts with teachers unless the Government acted to give them more funding.

The Secondary Heads Association is one of the most influential lobby groups in educational circles, representing around 11,000 headteachers across Britain,

Mrs Welsh takes over as president at a time when many schools are warning of huge cash problems and redundancies among teachers and classroom assistants.

She said: "There are clearly problems around the country with funding and it will be a priority to persuade the Government to give schools more money.

"As a professional association, we have to keep battling away with the Government to make them see that the workforce re-modelling agreement will not work unless we get the money to employ classroom assistants. There are also issues with teacher recruitment and retention. The Government doesn't seem to think there is a problem but schools everywhere are having difficulty getting staff because young people just don't want to become teachers."

Mrs Welsh has been headteacher at George Stephenson School for seven years, having worked previously at Whitley Bay High School and King Edward VI High School, in Morpeth.

She is currently vice-president of the Secondary Heads' Association, and has also held the post of its membership officer, when she added 2,000 new members to its rolls.

As well as lobbying the Government on school funding, Mrs Welsh said that she would be trying to get a better deal for schools in the North-East in her new role.

She said: "There has been a tendency for schools up here to be forgotten. I will be representing schools across the country, not just the North-East, but clearly I will be trying to get the best possible deal for schools in this region."

Mrs Welsh's term as president of the Secondary Heads Association will coincide with the start of new teaching contracts that say teachers should concentrate on duties in the classroom rather than on administrative tasks like photocopying.

But many schools have been unable to employ the classroom assistants needed to do the more mundane tasks because of their budget problems this year.