School Teachers’ Review Body: Recommendations

Calum Miller Excerpts

Thursday 22nd May 2025 Commons Chamber

[Catherine McKinnell]

This is a key priority for us. We want to ensure that we have the teaching workforce that children deserve, but that teachers deserve, too—they deserve to have a full fleet of teachers teaching the specialist subjects that they love, are committed to and are trained to teach. We know that key to unlocking the outcomes for children is having good, qualified teachers in every classroom, which is what we are legislating to achieve. It is also key for children with additional learning needs or disabilities that we ensure that every teacher is a teacher for special educational needs and disabilities, so that more children can be educated in their local school with their peers and get the outcomes they deserve.

[Calum Miller (Bicester and Woodstock) (LD)]

I was a school governor for 13 years and served as a finance governor, so I know these issues well. I want to draw the Minister’s attention to the plight of small, rural primary schools. There are many such schools in my constituency, and they are really up against it with the costs that they face. In the school that I served, 86% of the budget was spent on staffing, so a significant unfunded increase in staffing costs, whether through national insurance or salary contributions, has a huge impact. Will the Minister meet me to discuss sparsity funding and the equalisation of per capita funding so that primary schools in small, rural areas are not so serially disadvantaged?

[Catherine McKinnell]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his thoughtful question and for his years of service as a governor. I cannot reiterate enough how much we value the work that governors do in schools, and we need more people to step up and take the rewarding opportunity to support schools in that capacity. He rightly raises the challenges, which we know differ across schools, and that is why school funding is not uniform across schools; it varies according to circumstances. We are looking at the funding formula to ensure that it does allocate resource where it is most needed and where it can give the greatest outcome and the greatest benefit.