Small and Village School Funding

Debate between Neil O'Brien and Andrew Percy

Wednesday 17th July 2019 Westminster Hall

[Neil O'Brien]

I think my hon. Friend is correct, and I think we both want to see a faster transition to a fairer overall settlement. However, I want to focus on the point about the lump sum.

Leicestershire County Council was historically a strong supporter of small schools and had a lump sum of £150,000 per primary school. In the national funding formula, that is only £110,000. When consulting on the national funding formula, the DFE acknowledged that that number was lower than the average for most local authorities. As local authorities converge on the national funding formula, as they should, the pressure on small schools may intensify. The proportion of the core schools budget going through the lump sum declined in the last year, and the gap between income and expenditure is much smaller for small schools, indicating a financial pressure. In fact, larger schools have about twice as much headroom per pupil. Small schools are definitely feeling the pinch.

I hope and expect that, under the next Prime Minister, we will see a big increase in school funding. A good way of delivering that would be to increase the lump sum within the national funding formula. About a fifth of primary schools get more than 20% of their income from the lump sum, and for them an increase could make the difference between staying afloat and closing. There has been some discussion about increasing sparsity funding as an alternative, but I am a bit sceptical. Fewer than 6% of primaries get sparsity funding, and only 1% get the full amount; a number of small schools in my constituency that are under pressure would not be eligible. That is one reason why only a third of local authorities have included a sparsity element in their local formulas. Increasing the lump sum, if I could beg the Minister to do that, would be simpler and better. For a little more than £800 million, we could take the lump sum back up to £150,000 and get my village schools back to where they were.

[Andrew Percy (Brigg and Goole) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing the debate. I support his last point. One of my local authorities, North Lincolnshire Council, made a policy decision not to close any small schools, so the schools in my constituency with 45 or 50 children will remain open. However, the key issue that my local authority has asked me to raise with the Minister is the core funding costs. Admin costs, in particular, for a small school of 46 or 50 children are not dissimilar to those for a school of 100 to 150 children, because the same admin function is still needed. I therefore think that the point my hon. Friend the Member for Harborough (Neil O’Brien) is making is really important, and I want to offer him my full support and say that it is exactly the same point that my local authority is concerned about.

[Neil O’Brien]

I thank my hon. Friend. He is right and has brilliantly teed up something that I intended to say: the future for small schools and rural schools can be very bright. There are two reasons for that. One is that more and more people want to live in villages, and technology allows people to do that and work from home, rather than having to live in a major city. The other reason is the growth of multi-academy trusts—rather an ugly phrase for families of schools. The growth of those families of schools is enabling small schools in effect to combine the advantages of being a small school—the human scale and the connection to the community—with the advantages of being part of something bigger, which are being able to share resources, people and back-office functions and to learn from one another. Therefore, if we get behind them, village schools can have a really bright future.

I was in one such school just the other day in South Kilworth in my constituency. In many ways, it was a very traditional scene. I was watching the new school hall being built, thanks to school condition improvement funding, and the children were practising their maypole dancing. The fields were ripening around us and the sun was shining. It was a beautiful scene. We could have been time travelling, but that school is a modern school. It is part of a family of schools, which are helping one another to improve. It is a really good school and exactly the sort of thing that we want to keep in our communities. There are these very exciting opportunities opening up for small schools, but we need the Minister’s help to relieve the financial pressure on them if we are to fully achieve the potential of small and village schools.