Schools: Funding

Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall Excerpts

Thursday 29th November 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful for the opportunity to speak in the gap. I thank my noble friend Lady Morris for her powerful introduction to the debate. One can be beguiled by her courteous and fair-minded approach to everything she says into momentarily not noticing how devastating the analysis she put before us was. She said, very fairly, that money is not everything. She also said, very powerfully, that it is certainly something and when there is not enough of it the impacts are obvious.

I wish to refer to two issues. The first has been mentioned by a number of noble Lords, including the right reverend Prelate, and that is the impact on teachers of the struggles in which they currently have to engage to keep their schools afloat and doing a good job. I am particularly concerned about school leadership because this is where the experience of, in some cases, decades of teaching comes to be used in the service of schools as whole institutions. I see in my own family the day-to-day impact of the pressures on school leaders of these struggles. Does the Minister acknowledge that this not only has an impact on the well-being and mental health of teachers but also on their families, for whom witnessing the kind of stress that many teachers are experiencing at the moment is distressing and sometimes destructive?

This is causing the wearing thin of the fabric of our education system, at both personal and institutional levels. The repeated denial from the Government, as my noble friend Lady Morris said so powerfully, is disrespectful of the efforts that educationalists—teachers in particular—put in to trying to make sure that our children’s future is safe and productive. Education is, as she said—not in these words—a common enterprise and we should all be concerned about it.

My second point is about information that has come out of the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport in the past 24 hours concerning the current value of the creative industries, which has gone over £100 billion. Those industries are likely to be the source of many jobs and opportunities for the young people currently in our schools. The skills and aptitudes that they need are fed and nurtured by precisely the subjects—I will not enumerate them again because I and other people have done so many times —which are suffering as schools struggle to meet the demands of the EBacc and other curriculum subjects. They have less discretionary funding available to allow pupils to participate both academically and extracurricularly in these creative subjects.

Schools cannot therefore properly prepare children for the opportunities that are out there and available to them. They will not come out with the range of skills that the creative industries need and those jobs will therefore probably go to such migrants as manage to get through our increasingly difficult immigration system. As I have said many times, this is a shocking wasted opportunity and I hope, once again, that the Government will look with more imagination at the restrictions they are placing on the curriculum. This point was also powerfully made by my noble friend Lord Knight of Weymouth.

It is the Minister’s job, and I understand this, to defend government policy. Not for the first time I find myself feeling really quite sorry for him because he does not even have support, frankly, on his own Benches. I hope he will find the courage at least to acknowledge the problems that have been put before him in this debate, even if he cannot yet say exactly how they are to be resolved. Further denials from the Government about the crisis that education currently faces will simply lead to deeper despair, and that in turn will lead to incalculable consequences.

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[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Education (Lord Agnew of Oulton) (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, on securing this important debate on school funding. I acknowledge her great experience on this subject, particularly as a former Secretary of State for Education. It is a key priority for this Government to ensure that every child receives a world-class education to enable them to reach their full potential. We are determined to create an education system that offers opportunity to everyone, no matter what their circumstance or where they live. Raising educational standards is the key to everything we are doing, so ensuring that the financial resources are divided in the right way is vital to that.

However, I know enough about basic psychology to know that most noble Lords will approach this debate with their minds made up. None the less, as ever, I will do my best to show the House that the picture is far less bleak than commonly portrayed. We are making significant progress: more schools than ever are being rated good or outstanding. The noble Lord, Lord Watson, challenges that and says that the framework has changed. I suggest that it is actually tougher than it was seven or eight years ago. The attainment gap is closing—a significant priority for us—and, if we are here for social mobility, then that is one of the greatest pieces of evidence of what we have done. We have launched 12 opportunity areas to drive improvement in parts of the country that we know can do better. We are investing in our schools and have delivered on our promise to reform the unfair, opaque and outdated school funding system by introducing the national funding formula.

As my noble friend Lady Eaton said, we are investing an additional £1.3 billion in our schools across this year and next, as confirmed in our 2015 spending review. This significant additional investment means that core funding for schools and high needs will rise from almost £41 billion in 2017-18 to £42.4 billion in 2018-19 and £43.5 billion in 2019-20.

I take on board the comments from the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, and other noble Lords about statistics, but the independent Institute for Fiscal Studies has shown that real-terms per pupil funding for five to 16 year-olds in 2020 will be more than 50% higher than in 2000 and some 70% higher than in 1990. We could put these figures in a different way, and I accept that these debates can become somewhat reductive, but this is another way to deal with it than the way the noble Lords, Lord Bassam and Lord Storey, did. Putting it in the context of an average classroom, funding for an average primary school class this year is £132,000—up from around £124,000 a decade ago and £84,000 in 2000. That is in today’s prices. Those same children will receive an average of £171,000 when they move to secondary school per class, up from around £161,000 a decade ago and £109,000 in 2000, again in today’s prices.

It is not just the quantum of funding available that matters; it is vital that it is distributed fairly and where it is most needed. Prior to our recent reform of the funding system, schools with similar pupil characteristics across the country had been receiving markedly different levels of funding for no good reason. For example, Coventry received £510 more per pupil than Plymouth, despite having equal proportions of pupils eligible for free school meals. Nottingham similarly attracted £555 per pupil more than Halton. That is why our commitment to reform the unfair school and high-needs funding systems and introduce the funding formula has been so important. I am pleased that it has been this Government who have been able to deliver on that. The introduction of the national funding formula means that this year, for the first time, funding was distributed to local areas based on the individual needs and characteristics of every school in the country. This historic reform is the biggest improvement to school funding for a decade and is directing resources where they are needed most.

On a lighter note, I have a cold—I apologise to noble Lords—and I asked my office to get me some Tunes for my speech. None of them had ever heard of Tunes, so they said that they would google them. They sent a note through the Box just before I came here that said, “We couldn’t find choons”. Maybe my education priorities should be refocused.

Schools are already benefiting from the gains delivered by the funding formula. It has allocated an increase for every child in every school this year, while allocating the biggest increase to those schools that have been most underfunded. This year, schools that have been historically underfunded have attracted increases of up to 3% per pupil. Next year those schools will attract up to 6% more per pupil, compared with 2017-18.

We are particularly focused on supporting children who face great barriers to success, be that because they come from a disadvantaged background, have low prior attainment, or speak English as an additional language. Evidence shows that pupils with these characteristics are more likely to need extra support to reach their full potential. It is vital that we help schools to provide the support these pupils need. The national funding formula has protected the £5.9 billion additional needs funding across the system.

Under the national funding formula, a secondary pupil who had low attainment in key stage 2 will attract some additional £1,550 per year while in secondary education. A secondary pupil who speaks English as an additional language will attract an additional £1,385. A secondary pupil eligible for free school meals and living in one of the most deprived postcodes will attract an additional £2,035. Funding through these factors is all in addition to the basic per pupil funding that the child attracts. These important priorities are often misunderstood or ignored by the commentariat. I accept that it is a complicated system, but it is very much aimed to deal with those children in most need.

[Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall]

My Lords, I do not know whether the noble Lord is about to leave the question of the funding formula, but before he does, could he comment on the observations from my noble friends Lady Morris and Lord Knight that, while there might be some merit in the formula in itself, trying to implement it when the overall quantum of funds available is not increasing sufficiently means there will inevitably be many losers as well as a few gainers?

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

My Lords, I entirely accept that this is an extremely difficult subject that has been kicked down the road for a long time. Doing it at a time when there are not huge amounts of additional money makes it difficult, but the system puts a floor in the bottom so that no one loses out. Of course, the debate will always be about why we are not moving the bottom ones up quicker. I met a head from West Sussex only last week—