Education Funding in London

Bob Stewart Excerpts

Wednesday 4th May 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Steve Reed (Croydon North) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill) on securing this important debate. I was delighted to co-sponsor it with him and several other hon. Members. I have been delighted, too, to co-chair with him the all-party parliamentary group for London. It is important to see London Members of different parties in the Chamber, making the case for London’s children in the expectation that the Government will listen and do the right thing by our capital’s children.

London’s schools have been transformed in recent years, particularly since the London Challenge, which was introduced by the Labour Government in 2003 and which pushed the performance of London’s children above the national average, where they have remained ever since. London’s students outperform their peers both in GCSEs and at key stage 2, and they have a higher performance rate in GCSE maths and English than those in any other region in England. However, no one here—no one involved in education in London—considers that to be “job done”. We need to keep up the pressure in order to improve still further. In a globalised economy, London needs to compete with the best in the world, and that means no funding reductions that undermine our schools, heads, teachers, parents, governors and, above all, hard-working students.

The hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Graham Stuart) said that it was pernickety to keep education promises. That is not pernickety; it is a matter of trust—the trust of the electors. To breach that trust, as the Government do time and again, is absolutely wrong. All schools deserve fair funding, and, as my hon. Friends have pointed out today, that means levelling funding up, not down. London Councils estimates that London’s schools could lose about £260 million a year from their budgets as a result of the Government’s proposed new funding formula, and some London boroughs are bracing themselves for a loss of up to 20% of funding at every school. Cuts on that scale would push education backwards in the capital.

To protect completely the funding for all the schools that stand to lose out, the Government would need to increase the block grant by £514 million a year. That would give all schools the resources to match the country’s best-performing schools. That is clearly a very significant amount of money, but it is a fraction of the cost of forcing 18,000 maintained schools to become academies, which, in some quarters, is estimated to be as much as £1.3 billion. That is surely a deranged proposal that would distract many of the best schools from providing excellent education and force them to focus, quite unnecessarily, on governance instead. More than 80% of those schools are already rated good or outstanding, so it beggars belief that the Government want to undermine their success by making unnecessary and dogmatic changes.

There is no need to penalise children in London in order to increase funding elsewhere. Spending on education cannot be seen as a sunk cost; it is an investment that gives young people a better chance in life, and boosts economic growth by providing a better-skilled workforce that benefits all of us.

[Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)]

We are talking about a better chance in life and a more skilled workforce. I am sure that everyone in the Chamber will agree that children with special educational needs are often disadvantaged. We must make sure that their funding is maintained, if not increased, because real problems are starting to appear in the constituencies of Bromley and Chislehurst, and of Beckenham—particularly in secondary schools such as the Langley Park schools, of which my own children, I have to declare, are a part.

[Mr Reed]

The hon. Gentleman has made an important point. I am glad that he raised it, and I would be astonished if anyone in the Chamber disagreed with him. He is right: we need to keep a particular eye on the support available to those children, because of their vulnerability, and because they have not always been supported properly and helped to achieve what they should have been helped to achieve.

I want to focus for a moment on the situation in Croydon. Our borough’s funding per pupil is £592 lower than the London average. We have the biggest shortfall in places in the country, and over the next five years the number of primary school pupils in Croydon is projected to grow at twice the London average. Croydon faces a huge demand for new primary school places that the Government cannot continue to ignore; they cannot exacerbate the problem by making funding changes that will further disadvantage children in our borough.

A particular problem that has already been mentioned is that teachers in inner-London boroughs can be paid up to £5,000 a year more than those in outer London. A school that is right on the border, as several in my constituency are, may find it hard to attract teachers who can earn so much more at another school just a few hundred yards away. That anomaly needs to be addressed in the new formula—and not, so that Ministers do not misunderstand me, by cutting pay in inner London.

The hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness asked why anyone would question the Government’s motives. One reason why parents in London fear for their schools is the way the Government implemented the transitional relief grant earlier this year. Under that scheme, intended to ease the pain of local government funding cuts, £300 million of funding was made available, but all the relief went to wealthier areas that had received the lowest level of cuts. Surrey got an extra £24 million to spend, while Croydon got a further £44 million of cuts. It was nothing more than naked party political gerrymandering. If that happens again with schools funding, London’s children will suffer.

London Councils, a cross-party organisation, estimates that 29 of London’s 33 boroughs are at risk of losing funding that is likely to be transferred to less deprived areas. Such a decision would be perverse. I hope that the new Mayor of London, who will be elected tomorrow—I hope very much it is my right hon. Friend the Member for Tooting (Sadiq Khan)—will join me and other London MPs in making powerful representations to Ministers to protect London’s schools and children. We will not allow the Government to undermine education in our capital city. Our children’s lives matter too much, and our economic future depends on their success. I urge Ministers to turn back and think again.