Core School Budget Allocations Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateDepartment: Department for Education
Aaron Bell
Main Page: Aaron Bell (Conservative - Newcastle-under-Lyme)Department Debates - View all Aaron Bell's debates with the Department for Education
Core School Budget Allocations
Aaron Bell Excerpts(8 months, 1 week ago)
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Nick Gibb
Deprivation and disadvantaged children have been the core driving force of all our reforms since 2010. We are spending record amounts of money on school funding—£59.6 billion is the highest ever in cash terms, in real terms and in real terms per pupil. Before the pandemic, we had closed the attainment gap between disadvantaged children and other children by 13% in primary schools and by 9% in secondary schools. That has been undone by the pandemic, but we are determined to close that gap again. All the reforms that led to that closure are still in place, and we are confident, particularly with the £5 billion of recovery funding and the tutoring programme, that we will close that gap once again.
Aaron Bell (Newcastle-under-Lyme) (Con)
I welcome my right hon. Friend’s answers today, and I thank him for his leadership and his ownership of this issue, which is not his fault. He has approached it in exactly the right manner, as my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Sir Julian Lewis) said. I welcome that we are continuing to deliver the core schools budget in full, not just for mainstream schools, but for high needs. Will my right hon. Friend the Minister set out what the percentage increase for those areas will be in 2024-25, compared with this year?
Nick Gibb
On the increases in funding last year and this year, funding is increasing by £3.9 billion in 2022-23 and by £1.8 billion in 2024-25. When we combine that with the £4 billion increase we had between 2021-22 and 2022-23, that is a 20% increase in cash terms over that period.