Dedicated Schools Grant

Edward Morello Excerpts

Tuesday 6th May 2025 Westminster Hall

[Cameron Thomas]

As somebody who was—let us be generous—barely educated in Oxfordshire himself, I am very much aware of the issue.

My mainstream schools in Gloucestershire fall into the bottom 20% of DSG funding, earning £1,000 less per pupil than schools in the top 20. This means that Cleeve school, for example, with its 1,851 pupils, faces an approximate annual deficit of over £1.8 million compared with a similarly sized school in Middlesbrough.

[Edward Morello (West Dorset) (LD)]

I agree with all the points that my hon. Friend has made so far. This morning, I spoke to the headmaster of the Thomas Hardye school in Dorchester in my constituency. His previous job was at a London borough school in Croydon, where on average he received £10,000 per pupil; in West Dorset, that figure is £5,000. Does my hon. Friend agree that the Government’s funding formula for schools does not take into account the added costs of rurality and providing services in places like West Dorset and, no doubt, his own constituency?

[Cameron Thomas]

With such gravity, my hon. Friend says it better than I could ever hope to. The inequity is there for all to see, and it is interesting that one of his teachers has experienced both ends of that scale.

My four-year-old daughter and her friends will begin their primary school education in Gloucestershire in September. I want them to have, as the Labour manifesto put it, the opportunities they deserve. To me, that means the same opportunities as every other child—but by the time they finish their GCSEs under this inequitable system, the dedicated schools grant will have invested between £10,000 and £50,000 less in our children than in those elsewhere in the country.

The Government might point to an upward trend in the dedicated schools grant in Gloucestershire since 2021, but on the current trajectory, it will take 15 years to achieve equity. By then, my daughter and her friends will have long since left school. Unless the Government act now, their potential will have been diluted by the dedicated schools grant as is. By the time we achieve equity, according to trends based on the Government’s own statistics, the vast majority of those teaching today will have retired. My headteachers have told me that, for most schools, approximately 85% of their funding is ringfenced for staffing costs, but that rises to over 90% in some particularly desperate cases.

The level of teaching experience in our schools is diminishing because our headteachers are having to make their most experienced and highly paid teachers redundant, so that they can recruit less experienced teachers on lower wages just to balance the books.

--- Later in debate ---

[Claire Young (Thornbury and Yate) (LD)]

It is an honour to serve under your chairship, Ms Butler. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Tewkesbury (Cameron Thomas) for securing the debate.

Investing in education is investing in our future, so we need to get it right. The national funding formula creates huge discrepancies in how children are supported in different authorities. My local authority, South Gloucestershire, has long been at or near the bottom of the funding league table, and that lack of investment is having a real impact on children. Thornbury and Yate is largely rural, but most of the rest of South Gloucestershire is urban. Generally, with all sorts of Government funding, when taken as a whole, it has suffered through not being rural enough for rural support but not having the concentrations of deprivation seen in some urban areas. Even within my constituency there is huge variation in the demographics of school intakes.

I recently wrote to the Minister about the case of one primary school in my constituency that I visited. It provides a good example of the pressures caused by the unfairness in the existing funding system. Staff at the school told me that it has developed a reputation for being particularly supportive of children with SEND, and thus has an unusually high proportion of children who require extra support. On top of that, it is being asked to support increasingly high levels of medical needs, which its already overstretched staff are not trained to meet. It also has a high number of children with English as a second language, and a third of its pupils qualify for pupil premium funding.

In many ways, the school’s intake is comparable to a school the staff visited in London, yet that school gets much higher per pupil funding simply because of the local authority it is in. That shows in the services that the London school is able to provide, from having specialist art and music teachers to having two teachers per class. Our children in Thornbury and Yate deserve more than what the funding currently provides.

The disparity is undermining the work that our local schools do and leaving them worse off. We need a fairer national funding formula that supports disadvantaged and rural schools, not just those in more affluent and urban areas, and recognises the wide variation within local authority boundaries.

[Edward Morello]

I agree 100% with my hon. Friend’s point. I have no doubt that in her constituency, as in mine, there is a similar problem: when the Government talk about a fully funded pay increase, it is based on a school average. In many rural places, we do not have the average because we have smaller class sizes, or we have single, large schools that cover a large geographical area and a large number of pupils, which are heavily disadvantaged as a result.

[Claire Young]

I absolutely agree. It is a particular problem for small rural schools, which often have small class sizes because the schools are small overall.

We need action on funding for special educational needs and disabilities, as too many children are being left without the support they need. For years, schools in South Gloucestershire have had to ask the Government to allow them to take money from the schools block to supplement the high needs block. That reduces the funding available for early intervention which, as we know, is so important for better outcomes. It also makes the funding situation worse as more children need higher-cost interventions at a later stage. The high needs block must be protected and expanded to reflect the growing demand and rising complexity in children’s needs.

South Gloucestershire is one of the authorities with a safety valve agreement, which is intended to help councils to manage large deficits in their high needs budgets. It was signed pre-covid, with targets that are unachievable thanks to the impact of the pandemic. Next year, when the agreement ends, the council faces a cliff edge in funding. It, and other councils in that position, face impossible choices between balancing budgets and supporting vulnerable children.

Furthermore, in the case of South Gloucestershire, the previous Conservative Government failed to provide the requested £30 million of funding to provide an additional 200 special school placements locally. As well as being better for the children, that would have reduced costs. Earlier this year, I had a meeting with the Minister and South Gloucestershire’s council leadership in the hope that this Government would take a more sensible approach, but the focus seems to be on providing spaces in mainstream settings. We support that as a goal, with extra funding for early intervention to make it possible, while recognising that there are children who need support now and did not get that early intervention. We also need funding for them.

I ask the Minister to think again about what works now, because otherwise another generation of our children will miss out. Without a solution to the ending of the safety valve agreement, the whole system could collapse, leading to longer waits, reduced provision and more children out of school. We need sustainable, long-term funding for children with high needs, and an end to short-term financial firefighting.

Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education (Transfer of Functions etc) Bill [Lords]

Edward Morello Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 31st March 2025 Commons Chamber

[Pam Cox]

I thank my hon. Friend for her intervention, and I agree. This morning, before I travelled to Westminster from Colchester, I visited JTL, a national organisation with a base in our city that trains thousands of apprentice electricians and plumbers, and I had similar exchanges with them. So I very much agree, because the urgency I have mentioned is about their futures—securing their futures.

We debated this in some detail in Committee, and the hon. Member for St Neots and Mid Cambridgeshire has outlined the Minister’s responses. To my mind, those responses stand. I am satisfied that we should not delay in setting up Skills England, because the young people of Colchester—and, indeed, of Derby and elsewhere —simply do not have the time to wait.

On that note, last week the Government announced plans to train 60,000 new construction workers to help build the 1.5 million homes we will see going up in the course of this Parliament. Moves such as that and many others show that we are working at pace to reverse the many years of stagnation—

[Edward Morello (West Dorset) (LD)]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Pam Cox]

I will not give way, if the hon. Member does not mind.

I hope we can work at pace today to pass this Bill.

[Edward Morello]

rose—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

Order. Is the hon. Lady taking an intervention?

--- Later in debate ---

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

I want to make a short contribution to this Report stage debate, particularly in favour of new clause 4 and amendment 6. On the train coming up to Westminster, I typed into my tablet “Short IfATE speech”, and every time I did so, it kept changing it to “Short irate speech”. Unfortunately, I am not very good at irate speeches—it is not really my thing—so I will make a slightly disappointed speech, but with a hint of optimism, because I hope this Minister may take this opportunity to do something of significant benefit for the technical and vocational education and training system in this country.

I know why the Government came forward with the idea of a new quango—it is not even a quango, but a sort of semi-quango—called Skills England. They did that because they were going to have to talk to British industry about a lot of other things. They knew deep down that they would be doing things that were really very unpopular, such as the Employment Rights Bill and the massive hike in national insurance contributions and business rates, and that aspects of those things are bad for employment and unpopular with employers. With Skills England, Ministers—then campaigners, but now Ministers—had come up with something they thought business would really like and want.

In truth, however, if the Government are going to fix the two big underlying issues in our system—the productivity gap we have in this country compared with France, the United States and Germany, and the parity of esteem we all say we want, and that the Conservatives do want, between academic learning and vocational learning —we need to make technical and vocational education better. We also need to make it simpler and more appealing, but above all it needs to be made better. That is entirely what the Sainsbury review—spearheaded by the noble Lord Sainsbury, a Labour Lord—was all about. It was about giving us a simpler, more appealing system, led by business, which would deliver the highest quality of technical education.

[Edward Morello]

I take the right hon. Gentleman’s point about creating parity between academic and technical education. Would a useful step in the direction of attracting people into the apprenticeship scheme be to ensure that they are paid the national minimum wage in line with their age group?

[Damian Hinds]

The truth is that there is always a balance about apprenticeships. Of course, there can be abuses: in the past there were abuses of the apprenticeship system with the lower rate that could be paid, although many employers pay the full rate to people of whatever age who are doing apprenticeships. However, it is also true that providers are getting four days a week—not five—of work from somebody, and a form of learning is involved. It is the same, with the opposite proportions, when someone is doing a T-level, which is partly done at college and partly on an employer’s premises. There is always a risk that if we make that gap too narrow, fewer people may be afforded that opportunity in the first place. That balance has to be got right, but I take my hat off to all the many employers who have invested very strongly in their young people, particularly in the way the hon. Member outlines.

Clearly, quality cannot be guaranteed just by the structure of the Government Department or Executive agency that oversees it, but quality is less likely if we get that structure wrong. The two key things with IfATE—key to this debate and for the amendments we are considering —are, first, its independence from the Government, and secondly, that there was the guaranteed business voice. I am talking in the past tense already, but I mean that it is independent and there is a guaranteed business voice.

Which Minister is not going to say, “We’ll listen to business”? Of course, Ministers will say, “We’ll listen to business. We want business to be at the heart of our plans and designing them.” They will say that, but it is not guaranteed in what the Government plan to set up, and just saying they will listen is not enough. Such independence gives people, meaning the employers, the young learners and everybody else, the confidence of knowing that the Government—and it might not be this Government—could not erode the standards because they wanted to artificially increase the volumes of people on those courses.

It has been a feature of the broader debate to have Labour colleagues saying, “We’re going to get the numbers of people getting apprenticeships up.” Well, wahey, of course they are going to get the numbers up. That much is blindingly obvious. I am reminded of a time in the past when many apprentices did not know they were on an apprenticeship, so loose were the requirements. The Conservative Government raised the minimum length of time for an apprenticeship and raised the minimum amount of time in off-the-job training. In college-based education, the Sainsbury review reported that in many cases qualifications had become divorced from the occupations and sectors they were there to serve.

We are already seeing, with the change in the minimum length of apprenticeships from 12 months to eight months, the rowing back or erosion of that standard. There is plenty of training in industry that does not require a 12-month minimum and there always has been, but if somewhere is going to have a short course, just do not call it an apprenticeship. That training is very worth while, but that does not mean it is the same thing.

In Germany, which is the country people usually look to as the international standard on these matters, an apprenticeship typically lasts for two or three years, with two days a week—not one day a week—in college. In those two days a week, young people typically do a full timetable of what we in this country call general education or academic subjects, as well as vocational education. In Germany, people can do an apprenticeship to become a food and beverage manager, but if they want to be a bartender there is not an apprenticeship for that role, because it does not take that long to train to be a bartender—they do another kind of training.

In this country, we have come to a strange position with the apprenticeship levy. There is lots of lobbying to count more and more things as an apprenticeship, so they can be paid for out of the apprenticeship levy. That is not the right way around. Already, we ask the word “apprenticeship” to do a lot. In most countries, it means young people aged 16, 18 or 21.

Oral Answers to Questions

Edward Morello Excerpts

Monday 10th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[Catherine McKinnell]

The right hon. Lady appears to have misunderstood both the aims and impact of the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill. We recognise that parents must have an opportunity to have good schools in their area, and that schools must be able to set admission numbers to meet the requirements of the local community. That is why we expect local authorities to co-operate with schools in their area, and expect all schools to co-operate with the local authorities, to ensure that the right number of school places are available in the areas where they are needed.

[Edward Morello (West Dorset) (LD)]

15. What steps she is taking to increase funding for agricultural education and training.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Janet Daby)]

Land-based colleges receive higher funding per student to support delivery of programmes in agriculture, horticulture and forestry, and animal care and veterinary science. The 16 to 19 national funding rate will rise by 3.78% in 2025-26, increasing the funding for those programmes.

[Edward Morello]

Kingston Maurward college in my constituency of West Dorset provides essential training in agriculture, offering degrees, apprenticeships and short courses to equip the next generation of farmers with critical skills. What measures will the Minister take to ensure that farming courses are not underfunded compared with other vocational courses, and that agriculture is promoted as a viable career path?

[Janet Daby]

This Government are committed to education for 16 to 19-year-olds, and beyond. Extra funding is available for all important skills in high-value and high-cost areas, including manufacturing and farming. We value farmers hugely and we are committed to investing £5 million in the farming budget over two years.

Oral Answers to Questions

Edward Morello Excerpts

Monday 27th January 2025 Commons Chamber

[Janet Daby]

I assure the hon. Member that the Secretary of State has had such conversations and will continue to do so.

[Edward Morello (West Dorset) (LD)]

7. What steps her Department is taking to support schools requiring specialist facilities for SEND students.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Minister for School Standards (Catherine McKinnell)]

This topic is of interest to many colleagues across the House. The previous Conservative Education Secretary labelled the special educational needs and disabilities system that she left behind as “lose, lose, lose”, and the shadow Minister said that the previous Government should “hang their heads” in shame over their record. Just last week, a Schools Minister of 10 years said that they had “let down” thousands of children. We agree wholeheartedly. That is the system we inherited, but there is light at the end of the tunnel as this Labour Government work hard to reform and improve the system.

[Edward Morello]

Some 52% of students at Dorset Studio school in my constituency have special educational needs, which is well above the national average, and 11% are in receipt of education, health and care plans. A funding agreement between the Treasury and the Department for Education in February 2023 to upgrade the school’s facilities, including a new school hall, a canteen and specialist teaching facilities, aimed to bring the school up to purpose, yet there has been no progress since May 2024. Will the Minister outline what steps the Department will take to get the ball rolling? If she does not know, will she please meet me so that we can get things started as soon as possible?

[Catherine McKinnell]

I appreciate the hon. Gentleman’s question and his concern about making advancements. Improving capital provision for children with special educational needs and disabilities is a priority for this Government, which is why we have allocated £740 million of additional investment to create those additional places in mainstream and special schools. I am more than happy to look at the case he raises—indeed, it might also be for the Under-Secretary of State for Education, my hon. Friend the Member for Portsmouth South (Stephen Morgan), to look at.

Oral Answers to Questions

Edward Morello Excerpts

Monday 4th November 2024 Commons Chamber

[Bridget Phillipson]

I rather fear that the hon. Gentleman and his party have learned nothing from the massive defeat inflicted upon them by voters in July. I can assure this House that the review will be evidence-based and will not seek to fix things that are not broken. However, I remind the hon. Gentleman that his record is a SEND system in crisis, one in five children persistently absent from school—they cannot learn if they are not there—falling standards, a persistent disadvantage gap, and over half of disadvantaged pupils in state primary schools not leaving with the required standards in English and maths. He might be proud of that record, but I am not.

[Edward Morello (West Dorset) (LD)]

T1.   If she will make a statement on her departmental responsibilities.

[The Secretary of State for Education (Bridget Phillipson)]

Last week’s Budget protects key education priorities, putting education back at the forefront of national life and breaking down barriers to opportunity for every child at every stage. The Department for Education’s settlement means that we can begin to deliver on this Government’s mission: rolling out funded childcare, rebuilding and maintaining our school and college estate, reforming the SEND system, investing in children’s social care, and ensuring that young people have the skills that they need to seize opportunity.

Additionally, the £2.3 billion increase in core schools funding, together with July’s fully funded 5.5% teacher pay award, further supports our commitment to recruit 6,500 new teachers. This Government will fix the foundations to deliver change, and there is no better place to start than education.

[Edward Morello]

West Dorset has seen a 134% increase in the number of children requiring SEN support in the last six years. As of the latest data, more than 275 children are waiting for education, care and health plan assessments, with the average waiting time well in excess of the 20-week statutory limit. Will the Minister outline what specific measures the Department is implementing to ensure that the much-needed £1 billion investment announced in the Budget is used to bring down waiting times for EHCPs in places such as West Dorset?

[Bridget Phillipson]

The hon. Gentleman is right to raise his concern, as so many have this afternoon, about the state of the system for supporting children with SEND. It is not working, and we know it needs reform, but committing an extra £1 billion into the system at this crucial time was an important first step. We face choices on how to take this system forward, and how to make it less adversarial and more focused on better life chances for our children. One of the first steps I took was to refocus the work of the Department for Education on children with SEND.