Core School Budget Allocations Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateDepartment: Department for Education
Daniel Zeichner
Main Page: Daniel Zeichner (Labour - Cambridge)Department Debates - View all Daniel Zeichner's debates with the Department for Education
Core School Budget Allocations
Daniel Zeichner Excerpts(6 months, 2 weeks ago)
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Nick Gibb
My hon. Friend is right. I have to say that my experience of this particular team in the Department is that they are one of the best teams I have dealt with. This was an error made by officials. They have owned up to it and we have corrected it. It does not affect school funding at all, and it relates to the next financial year, 2024-25. It certainly does not affect this financial year, 2023-24, and the funding of the pay award. Incidentally, it is the highest pay award for 30 years. The 6.5% pay award for teachers is fully funded, with an extra teachers’ pay grant of £525 million this year and £900 million next year. It is totally unaffected by this error.
Daniel Zeichner (Cambridge) (Lab)
Cambridgeshire schools are some of the lowest funded in England, and they will now receive £4.4 million less than they expected. The Minister will know that local authority officials and schools will now have to spend time recalculating their budgets. What will he do to compensate them for the time they are spending on that?
Nick Gibb
The situation is unfortunate for local authorities, which will have been spending time calculating their school budgets on a local authority basis. That is why we wanted to get the recalculation of the figures done as soon as possible and out to local authorities. Cambridgeshire is funded in the way it is because we base funding on the level of deprivation in our communities. We have targeted a greater proportion of the schools national funding formula towards deprived pupils than ever before. In total, about £4.4 billion, or 10% of the formula, will be allocated according to deprivation factors in 2024-25. If an area has fewer children from disadvantaged backgrounds than other areas, that will of course be reflected in its overall ranking for local authority funding.