West Sussex Schools Funding

Debate between Lord Soames of Fletching and Peter Bottomley

Wednesday 2nd November 2016 Westminster Hall

[Sir Peter Bottomley (Worthing West) (Con)]

I hope my hon. Friend the Minister will have in front of her, either now or shortly, “Annex C: local authority schools block units of funding 2015 to 2016”, which is part of the guidance entitled “Fairer schools funding: arrangements for 2015 to 2016”. It lists every education authority in the country, and at the bottom, by £90, is West Sussex. In some charts, we are fifth lowest. Some say we are third lowest. This annexe C, issued by the Department, spells out that we are £90 lower than the next lowest, so I say to the Minister that in the transitional funding that is needed, she should ensure that that £90 at least is made up. When we start looking at the allocation of the £390 million to 69 unfairly funded authorities, we would expect that the lowest-funded authority would get slightly more than 0.2% of that £390 million. Bromley went up by 11%. Shropshire, the county of my birth, went up by about 7%. Why did West Sussex get not the 0.9% given to the Isle of Wight, which is funded more fairly than West Sussex, but less than one quarter of that? Those are the challenges.

[Sir Nicholas Soames]

My hon. Friend has done our area a great service by raising the issue in this way, but he is such an old silverback—in a gorilla colony, as he knows, the silverbacks are the ones to whom everyone listens—that he remembers the long-gone days when these formulae were fixed in the most abstruse and archaic manner. Does he agree that it is preposterous that, as our hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) mentioned, we are being funded in a positively 18th century manner to equip our children to do work for modern times? It is not on.

[Sir Peter Bottomley]

I agree with my right hon. Friend. I seldom correct him, but he may have said that I was the Father of the House. If I get re-elected next time and three of the five other people who were first elected before me do not, I might then have that role, but until then I shall look on myself as—

[Sir Nicholas Soames]

You are still a silverback. [Laughter.]

[Sir Peter Bottomley]

I will not regard that as unparliamentary.

We have heard mention of special needs, and in my constituency Palatine school and Oak Grove college do really well with their pupils. Both heads have written to me, and I have passed that on to the Department. I bring up Palatine school because its aim is that every pupil should be empowered. How can the dedicated teachers empower their pupils, with special needs or not, if they do not have the funding? The message that we will take up with the Secretary of State, and will take up now with her colleague the Minister, is this: get on with some transitional relief, which will make a significant difference to the heads’ burdens.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert) talked about Steyning grammar school, and my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) talked about schools in his constituency. In our part of West Sussex, people go to schools outside of their constituencies, so we are in this together. I hope the Minister comes down to meet some of the heads and the pupils, who behaved impeccably at that petition event at Downing Street. I hope they can be as proud of her as she would be of them. However, it does need money.

The issue is the historic negative. All funding up to now has been based on what happened before, and it gets worse and worse. I ask the Minister and her advisers, especially the statisticians, not to treble count deprivation. Everyone knows that high needs have to be met and that pupil premiums are justified, but if they affect so much of the grant for schools, we get a distortion. When we move past the transitional stage to the next fairer funding national scheme, no other education authority or school within an area—there is a possible exception of one outlier at the top and one at the bottom because there is always some exception—can be more than 35% from the highest or lowest. There has to be a narrower range than at present. The £8,000 per pupil in Westminster may be the exception because there are very few schools in Westminster, and we may find something at the other end that needs the least funding, but beyond those, we cannot allow a gap of 100% or 50% and must bring it down to about 35%. That can become one of the rules within which the exemplifications are worked out. I know perfectly well how local authority funding has been run and how health service funding has been run: exemplifications come in, Ministers arrange things and there are some anomalies that cannot be dealt with. However, they can be dealt with, and West Sussex is one of them.

I have said to you privately, Mr Gray, and I say to the Labour party spokesman, the hon. Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East (Mike Kane)—I am sorry there is not a Liberal here for this important debate, but I am sure they would agree with us—that I cannot stay for the Minister’s winding-up speech because I have a charity’s trustees meeting to attend. However, I hope that my short remarks, especially the point about annexe C, which spells out that West Sussex is at the bottom, shows what the Minister needs to change.