BUDGET cuts and falling rolls will result in 19 teaching posts in York and 15 more in North Yorkshire being lost.

A total of 55 full-time posts will go next year in the county council area through redundancy and natural waste and these will be replaced by 40 new equivalent posts.

Cynthia Welbourne, the director of education at North Yorkshire County Council, said the changes would raise questions about how teachers could sustain standards.

She said: "A teacher's job has grown a lot in the last few years and the expectations of them are very high.

"If their capacity to do the job starts going backwards there is a real question about how they can sustain the performance on all fronts."

Anne Burn, president of the National Association of Headteachers' York branch, said that 19 permanent teaching contracts in York had been discontinued.

She said this figure did not include those teachers whose short term or temporary contracts may not have been renewed.

"York is not unique. The situation is the same throughout the country," she said.

"If the redundancy is due to falling rolls, the impact on the children will be less severe. But if teachers have been made redundant in schools where there are the same number of children there may be significant effects."

Mrs Burn said schools could end up cutting specialised subjects, such as music, or having larger or mixed age classes.

A BBC survey found that more than 700 teachers were facing redundancy because schools were running out of money.

Local authorities surveyed by the BBC said they would be laying off a total of 1,400 staff.

Updated: 10:51 Monday, June 02, 2003