School Funding

Gareth Thomas Excerpts

Monday 4th March 2019 Westminster Hall

[Ruth Cadbury (Brentford and Isleworth) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Christopher. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Blaydon (Liz Twist) on leading this debate and Mr Ramanandi, who led the creation of the petition, as well as those who organised and signed it throughout the country.

This is the second debate on education this year that I have attended in this Chamber—the first was on college funding—and the pattern is the same: Government party Members wring their hands about the impact of financial cuts in their constituencies. When will they realise that what they are describing is a direct impact of their failed austerity project? We cannot do more with less.

I concur with many points made already by Members in this debate, so I will focus on how the cuts in school funding have impacted in my borough, Hounslow. I have seen at first hand the great work that our schools are doing—23 of our schools are rated outstanding by Ofsted; our secondary schools perform above the UK average in Progress 8 scores; and our primary schools exceed the national average in reading, writing and maths—and that is in a community where the majority of children do not speak English as a first language at home and with high levels of churn in its schools. Hounslow Council has also invested £177 million in capital funding for the expansion of primary, secondary and SEN schooling, but that is all happening despite the steeply rising and unjust cuts being imposed on our schools by the Government.

Other Members have talked about the experience of their constituencies. In Hounslow we have seen cuts in total spending per pupil since 2010, and real-terms cuts in per-pupil funding between 2015 and 2019. Local authority spending on school services has been cut, so that—if they still exist—they now have to be bought back by schools. Before, schools had them for free and yet now school budgets have been cut, as we have heard so many times. The range of extracurricular and curricular activities supported by councils has gone down and down. This year, schools in Hounslow have lost teachers, teaching assistants, support staff, auxiliary staff and the essential additional support that children in crisis or trouble need in particular.

To give some numbers, we have had an additional 5,640 primary and secondary places in the borough, and a 51% increase in children with special needs or an education, health and care plan since 2012—that is the third highest increase in London—and we face £27 million in funding cuts in 2018-19, with £4.5 million savings in education and early-years provision. Added up, that has a massive impact on the ability of our children to learn with good quality. As others have said, many schools, teachers and parents have expressed concerns about children with special needs in particular.

[Gareth Thomas (Harrow West) (Lab/Co-op)]

My hon. Friend’s experience in Hounslow is mirrored in other parts of London, including in my constituency. The headteacher of an outstanding special needs school in my constituency wrote to me, knowing this debate was to take place, to flag that in order to balance her budget she faces having to drastically reduce staffing ratios in her school.

[Ruth Cadbury]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right that it is both the numbers and the quality of staff at special needs schools that make such a difference to children’s outcomes. But that is for the children who get into the special schools: I hear again and again from parents, teachers and governors about children who desperately need to be assessed. Even once assessed, they desperately need the right support either in their mainstream school or in a special school, but they are not getting it. They have to wait—not because of a lack of will, but because of a lack of professional support and places. In London, we have the additional problem of a massive shortage of professional psychological and psychiatric support in child and adolescent mental health services. Children with special needs who are not supported not only are suffering, with an impact on their future; their troubles have an impact on the other children in the class, affecting their learning. That is unacceptable.

Teachers and governors have written to tell me about a number of things, including the inability to provide maintenance to replace air conditioning—in Hounslow under the flight path, the windows cannot be opened in summer. Another cannot replace an inclusion mentor and children are not getting the high-quality art and technology support because the technician has had to be cut.