David Mowat
Main Page: David Mowat (Conservative - Warrington South)Department Debates - View all David Mowat's debates with the Department for Education
(9 years, 10 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Matthew Hancock
I am delighted to say that there are over 20,000 ambassadors from engineering who go into schools under the STEMNET—the science, technology, engineering and mathematics network—programme. It is just one example of the organisations that can help to bring employment and education together.
David Mowat (Warrington South) (Con)
7. What steps he is taking to adopt a revised funding formula for schools.
The Minister for Schools (Mr David Laws)
Our proposal to allocate £350 million to the least fairly funded local areas in 2015-16 is the biggest step towards fairer schools funding for a decade. This puts us in a much better position to introduce a national fair funding formula when multi-year spending plans are available.
David Mowat
The Minister may be aware that Warrington is ranked 137th for funding out of 152 authorities. As a comparator, Westminster, which is ranked 10th, receives £3,000—60% extra—more per child each year than Warrington. It was therefore disappointing that in this new allocation, Westminster received a big uplift and Warrington received nothing—perpetuating that differential, which is really unacceptable. Will the Minister explain the logic behind that, and does he agree that we need to move to a national formula very quickly indeed?
Mr Laws
I would make two points. First, what we sought to do in the announcement of a couple of months ago was address the issues not just of low funding, but of unfair funding. It is still possible for some parts of the country that are not the lowest funded to be underfunded, as we saw in the announcement. As for comparing Westminster with Warrington, although traditionally thought of as an affluent area, Westminster has had something like 50% of its children entitled to free school meals over the last six years, so it benefits, quite rightly, from high levels of disadvantage funding. Secondly, I agree with my hon. Friend in that his points make the case for moving on from this allocation to a full national fair funding formula in the next Parliament, to which both our parties are committed.