National Funding Formulae for Schools and High Needs

Baroness Scott of Bybrook Excerpts

Wednesday 14th December 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nash]

My Lords, I share the view of the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, that raising school standards is the most important thing. I perhaps should declare an interest, because he got me into this in the first place.

I do not want to sound complacent, but all schools have known for some time that they effectively face a cost pressure of 8% through pensions and national insurance. The school system is adjusting to that remarkably well, actually. I can only repeat what I said earlier: the toolkits that we published and the methodology being developed to re-engineer some processes without resulting in redundancies, in many cases, are remarkably effective. A closer analysis of some of the techniques, where adopted—I agree that they need to be more widely adopted across the sector—will show that they are effective.

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

My Lords, I bring the attention of the House to my entry in the register of interests as leader of Wiltshire Council. I welcome the review, which has been long awaited by all our schools. I particularly welcome the fact that it has been noted that there are issues with rural schools, and that the Government suggest that we protect those schools and particularly look at the sparsity factor and the cost of delivering education in a rural area.

However, when we look at this review of the funding formula, have we taken into account our military children and families? There is an issue about the funding of military children and its costs, and they are a group that often struggles to come up to the standards of other children because of the type of life they live and the moves they make. I urge the Minister to continue to look at having something in the formula that helps communities with large numbers of military children.

[Lord Nash]

I certainly share my noble friend’s concern about small rural primary schools, which will on average benefit under these proposals by over 5%. We will publish, school by school, the impact of the national funding formula later today. I will certainly look more closely at the impact on military children and families.