Academies (Funding)

Andy Burnham Excerpts

Thursday 16th June 2011 Commons Chamber

[Andy Burnham (Leigh) (Lab)]

(Urgent Question): To ask the Secretary of State for Education to make a statement on funding for the academy programme.

[The Minister of State, Department for Education (Mr Nick Gibb)]

The errors reported in the Financial Times today relate to mistakes made by local authorities in their returns to the Department for Education, which relies on local authorities to provide accurate information about their spending. Occasionally, individual local authorities make errors that can lead to academies getting too much, or indeed too little, funding. The system for funding academies, which was set up—I have to say—by the previous Government, is unclear, unwieldy and, in our view, unfair. It is no surprise, therefore, that some errors occur, which is why we are proposing changes to the school funding system to ensure that all schools and academies are fairly funded. We are proposing a system without the complexities that lead to these types of problems.

It is slightly odd for the right hon. Gentleman to ask these questions and attack us for the failings of a system created by the previous Labour Government, of which he was a member. We are the ones sorting it out, just as we are sorting out this country’s historic budget deficit. The question for him is: does he agree that we should raise the bar for secondary schools from 35% achieving five good GCSEs including English and maths, to 40% next year? Does he agree that we should further raise it to 50% by the end of this Parliament? Does he agree with our announcement today—[Interruption.] I do not know why the Opposition do not want to hear this. Does he agree with our announcement on extending the academies programme to underperforming primary schools, particularly the 200 worst-performing primary schools, many of which were in that state for a decade while his party was in government?

[Andy Burnham]

When will the Government learn that they cannot just bat away the question and always blame somebody else for the things that go wrong? Today’s Financial Times writes that the Department has given a large number of academies in England more money than they were entitled to. The news comes just days after the Secretary of State caved in to a legal claim from 23 councils that too much money was taken from their budgets to pay for academies. This raises a simple question: do the Secretary of State and the Minister have a grip on the budget?

But where is the Secretary of State? On a day when serious questions are being asked about whether the rapid expansion of his academy programme is backed up by a properly funded plan, only this Secretary of State could be in Birmingham announcing another major expansion of it. Why is he not here making that statement to the House of Commons? Should he not be here to reassure Members that he can proceed with his academies programme fairly and efficiently without penalising other schools in Members’ constituencies? Will the Minister tell the House how many schools have been overfunded, and what is the total amount paid in error? Will this money be clawed back from schools? It is not good enough for the Minister to stand there and blame everybody else. When will he take responsibility for the budget of his own Department? If it did not spot the mistake before the Financial Times reported it, why not? When will it put in place a proper accounting procedure?

Under threat of legal action, the Government have announced a U-turn on academy funding. Can the Minister set out the details and timetable for a review, and does he accept the need for urgency? Is it not the case that the Secretary of State repeatedly finds himself in these positions because he rushes ahead and fails to consult people on changes? We have been here before on school sport, education maintenance allowance and Building Schools for the Future. The only way people can make him listen to them is to launch a legal action. That is no way to run a Department. We hear that he will pay the councils’ legal costs. In the past year, he has spent more money on solicitors’ fees than Ryan Giggs and Fred Goodwin put together. How much has he spent on legal costs, and is this not a scandalous waste, when every penny is needed for children’s education?

The Secretary of State is today raising the floor targets for secondary schools and focusing the academy programme on struggling schools. These are Labour policies, and we are pleased at his dramatic conversion to them. We support raising standards in our schools; it is the standards of the Secretary of State we worry about. Perhaps the plan we needed to hear today was for poorly performing Departments to be taken over by successful ones. The only trouble is—there are no successful Departments. On the radio today, the Secretary of State tried pathetically to blame Labour for his latest blunder. Is it not time that he took responsibility for his own serial incompetence before people lose confidence in him altogether?

[Mr Gibb]

Yet again, the right hon. Gentleman overstates his case. First, the Secretary of State is in Birmingham today speaking to the National College for School Leadership, which is a very important part of our system of raising standards, and I am sure that his predecessors spoke every year to those conferences too. We are taking action to tackle the problems, although I should remind the right hon. Gentleman that the problem highlighted by the Financial Times occurred every year under the last Labour Government. The difference between the former Government—his Government—and this one is that we are taking action to sort it out. That is why we announced a fundamental review of the school funding system. That review is already taking place, and we will be making further announcements and holding a further consultation on the details later this year.

The right hon. Gentleman also raised the issue of the LACSEG—the local authority central spend equivalent grant—which is about double funding, where central Government are funding both the local authority and the academy for the same central services. Again, that is something that occurred under the last Labour Government, and we are sorting it out. That is why the Department for Communities and Local Government top-sliced £148 million off the funding to local government—to deal with that double funding. We are now looking at the issue again, as a result of the action taken by the 23 local authorities, and sorting it out. I would like to know from the right hon. Gentleman whether he supports us in our review of the funding system, so that we can create a simpler and clearer system that all can understand, and one that is similar for schools and academies. We want to achieve a per-pupil funding system that is fair and that all can understand, rather than the system over which his Government presided where schools in some local authorities received some £4,000 more per pupil than other schools with the same problems. Those are the problems that this Government are seeking to sort out, and I hope that he will support us in those plans.