School Funding Formula

Anne Marie Morris Excerpts

Tuesday 10th March 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Walker]

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish), who has always been a great champion for rural areas.

F40, the cross-party campaign formed more than 20 years ago to represent the lowest-funded areas, used to rail against a gap of hundreds of pounds in funding between rural areas and their urban areas, and in Worcestershire, local MPs spoke out against a gap that doubled during the 13 years of the previous Labour Government. Until the current year, it had never once narrowed. When the gap started, there was no justice in the fact that similar schools serving similar catchments with similar levels of deprivation on different sides of a random border could receive wildly different funding. As the gap has widened, so the challenge for schools to raise the attainment of all their pupils has become greater and the challenge to hold on to their best teachers bigger. Although the pupil premium has helped some schools in F40 areas, it has also added to the disparities by piling targeted funding for deprivation on top of the untargeted funding that went before.

[Anne Marie Morris (Newton Abbot) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that there is particular difficultly in fast-growth areas, such as Devon, where there are large distances to take children back and forth to school?

[Mr Walker]

My hon. Friend is undoubtedly right that there is a problem in fast-growth areas. As I shall explain shortly, per-pupil funding is crucial to this debate.

--- Later in debate ---

[Anne Marie Morris (Newton Abbot) (Con)]

I shall be brief. Every child deserves a fair level of funding. The fact that so many Devon MPs are here today demonstrates how strongly we feel about being the sixth lowest funded authority. We get £4,602 per pupil, which compares with a national average of £5,082—there is a funding gap of £41 million. We face specific problems and I wish to mention two. First, the existing formula contains no recognition of high-growth areas, of which Devon is one. As a result, Devon has to set aside £1.5 million to deal with growth every year for the next seven years. Secondly, the transport costs are completely ignored. We have 16,051 children being bused to school every day—that is 33% of the transport budget. I thoroughly recommend the F40 proposals. They need to be introduced as a matter of urgency. If they were, Devon’s children would be better off by £205.64 per pupil by 2015-16. Roll on the change!