PARENTS of children at St Laurence School, Bradford on Avon have been told the school will come through this year £70,000 in the red and that staff had to be cut to stop them slipping further into debt.

Five teachers will be made redundant in a bid to balance the books.

Chairman of the governors, Vivien Davies told parents at a meeting on Tuesday: "Through these last two terms we have worked desperately hard to make cutbacks. We have to try and find the money we need and have done the minimum amount of maintenance on the building to cut costs.

"There is only one place to make up the shortfall and that meant we had to make redundancies But next year we will still be £154,000 in deficit."

More than 100 parents attended Tuesday's meeting at which staff also admitted that they had handled things badly over the past few months. They not kept parents well enough informed of the financial problems and proposed changes to the school timetable.

Acting headteacher, Vivienne Walker said: "We have not been good on communications, and we will get better."

Headteacher Nick Sorensen quit last month after the financial problems came to light.

The redundancies were made at the same time as a massive review of the school timetable, and Mrs Walker told parents about ambitious plans for reshaping the school day, which will start being put in place from September.

There are plans for a new tutor system, a form of electronic registration, and bigger class sizes as a result of teacher redundancies.

The more children the school takes in, the more money they will get from the Government, and they hope this will help balance the books in the future.

But parents were angry about the plan for bigger class sizes.

One said: "Why can't we set a deficit budget? Why do we have to lay the bill for it on our children's heads?"

Mrs Davies said: "We have had to make these redundancies because at some point we have to pay the money back."

In the new plans, the school will have three headteachers for the lower, middle and upper school and a system of electronic registration, whereby teachers could have palmtop computers.

Mrs Walker said: "This will carry more information and if there are any problems with attendance we should be able to pick them up faster. But I have no doubt that there will be problems getting used to the system."

In a bid to reassure parents, John Croft from the county council's education department said: "I am convinced this school is on the right track, it's just a shame that all the plans for the future have clashed head on with the redundancies.

"Wiltshire is very poorly funded by the Government for education, so this is a countywide problem."

Education minister Charles Clarke caused a storm recently when he demanded all the LEA's outline their funding position, after claims money was being held onto by councils. Wiltshire LEA say they passed on more than 100 per cent of Government money they were given to the county's schools.