Education Funding (South Liverpool)

George Howarth Excerpts

Tuesday 10th October 2017 Westminster Hall

[Maria Eagle]

I will indeed—and I think my hon. Friend has himself just pushed the Minister for a response. I am sure the Minister will want to make some points in reply and set out his understanding of the impact of the national funding formula, which seems not to advantage schools in our area as much as I would like.

Liverpool City Council told me that, according to its calculations, the Garston and Halewood constituency will lose £390 per pupil—a cut of more than £4.5 million between 2015 and 2020—which is not dissimilar to what my hon. Friend said is happening in his area. That is the equivalent of a cut of 125 teaching jobs. The local authority told me that across Liverpool as a whole the loss is £487 per pupil, or a 9% cut overall, and a cut of almost £28.5 million between 2015 and 2020, equivalent to 778 teaching jobs.

The Minister may well say that the revisions that were made to the national funding formula in July and September, with the finding of savings from his Department and the raiding of various capital budgets for £1.3 billion, will make a difference to that, but many of the schools in my constituency have reported to me that they have or are planning to cut teaching and support staff posts. One headteacher of a local primary school, which the Minister’s letter tells me will see an increase of 0.9%, told me that

“the current staffing levels are unsustainable due to the differentials between school income and school expenditure on staff… The Governors are currently planning a staffing review to identify how we can reduce staffing costs by making teachers and teaching assistants redundant. We need to lose three teachers by 2019 if we are to manage our school budget without going into deficit. This will mean we will not have a qualified teacher in each class, which by law we must have. We are looking ahead at troubled times in schools.”

That is not the only school to have told me it is planning staffing reductions. One school, which has already seen a significant cut in teaching and support staff and a narrowing of the breadth of its curriculum as a result, is now contemplating further reductions to the curriculum, to pastoral staffing and to the length of the school day and the school week.

Some of my schools have been hit particularly hard, according to Liverpool City Council figures. Springwood Heath Primary School in Allerton is a unique school. It is a mainstream primary with enhanced provision places, which integrates children with significant physical and medical needs into its community. The city council projects that it will lose more than £719 per pupil—a 14% cut. Although that may be ameliorated by the changes to the national funding formula, which the Minister will no doubt tell us about later, it is already losing teachers and support staff, and to lose support staff at Springwood Heath is to put at risk the ability of some pupils to continue to attend because they depend on those support staff, who enable them to attend that mainstream school. That would be a particular concern to me. It might be said, “Well, so you lose a few support staff,” but if those staff are ensuring that severely disabled children can attend a mainstream school, that is more than simply losing support staff; it is losing a richness and quality of education that no other school offers. If the Minister comes to Liverpool, which I invite him to do, I hope he visits Springwood Heath Primary School. Then he could tell me whether in his experience there is another school like it. I am not sure that there is.

[Mr George Howarth (Knowsley) (Lab)]

A few moments ago my hon. Friend made the point that the evidence is that the funding formula adjustments announced in the summer have not really resolved the problems in south Liverpool. As she is aware, my information is that all bar three of the schools in Knowsley—so this affects her constituency as well—will have either no change or further reduction to their funding. The sort of situations that she described in that one important school will then be played out across Knowsley, to the detriment of the education of the children concerned.

[Maria Eagle]

My right hon. Friend is correct. He and I, as representatives of the borough, know that there is an issue of attainment in Knowsley schools. It is a long-standing one, which we continue to try to tackle, as Governments of all stripes have tried to do. It is certainly not ameliorated and improved by taking money away from schools. That will just deepen and worsen the attainment gap that is already there. If that were to happen, it would be a very great worry.

Liverpool City Council figures also tell me that Stockton Wood Primary School in Speke, one of the most deprived wards in the country, will lose £659 per pupil, which is a 13% cut; Garston Church of England Primary School will lose £616 per pupil, a 12% cut; and Childwall Valley Primary School, in Belle Vale, will lose 12% or £671 per pupil.

Lest the Minister believe that only schools in the most deprived wards are being hit, I can tell him that St Julie’s Catholic High School in Woolton is facing a £555 per pupil cut, which is a 10% cut, and St Francis Xavier’s College—the school that first contacted me to express worries and about which I wrote to his Department in February—is facing a cut of £508 per pupil, or 10%. Given that the school told me at the time that its financial situation was unsustainable and that it has made 13 staff redundant, with a further six posts unfilled, I wonder what the Minister thinks will be the impact on it of the revision to the national funding formula. The revised figures from the National Education Union suggest that SFX will still lose 5% per pupil. His letter tells me that the school will have an increase, but since the new figures were produced no one has told me—certainly not the headteacher, to whom I have spoken—that it will be able to avoid painful decisions about what to do in respect of its provision.

I note that the Minister sent me a letter—as I am sure he did to many other Members—dated 14 September about the impact of his revisions to the national funding formula on schools in my constituency. For the life of me, I cannot work out how he has come to the conclusion that he came to, which is that every school on the list will have an increase in its funding. The Minister’s letter refers to “illustrative figures”, stressing that they are “not actual allocations”, which might provide some clue as to what is going on. There is also an assumption that the new formula is being implemented in full this financial year, without any transition. The baseline figure is from a year subsequent to the one in which the £2.7 billion cuts were implemented, so it is not clear how realistic the figures produced are. All that sounds like a way of saying that the table the Minister has produced contains fantasy figures that bear no relation to what is happening, and that those figures are all mysteriously going up, even though schools and headteachers still tell me that they are facing budget shortfalls that necessitate their cutting teachers and having to consider other painful decisions in order to balance their budgets.

The National Education Union has revised its own list of the impact of the new funding formula to take into account the extra, recycled £1.3 billion of Department for Education money that the Secretary of State announced in July she had found and expanded upon in her statement in September. The NEU figures at least have the merit of setting out their methodology in full: based on the core schools budget, which represents 75% of school spending, and using block funding allocations for 2015-16 as the baseline, the NEU figures compare the 2019-20 amounts for schools in the Government’s NFF document, apply the Office for Budget Responsibility estimate for inflation, and take pupil numbers from the most up-to-date school census. On that basis, 29 of the 31 schools in my constituency lose out, some seeing a cut of up to 12% and many of those with the highest number of pupils receiving free school meals losing the most.

To my mind, that is one of the most pernicious effects of the Government’s new way of funding schools. How can it be right that Middlefield Community Primary School, where 68% of pupils are entitled to free school meals, is set to lose £558 per pupil, a cut of 10%, and that even Enterprise South Liverpool Academy, where 81% of pupils are entitled to free school meals, is losing £61 per pupil, a cut of 1%? I do not call that fair funding; I call that hitting the most deprived communities the hardest.

Providing a good and rounded education for all citizens is one of our society’s greatest benefits and achievements. It also has the merit of being a great leveller, enabling people to make their way in life, to succeed and to make the most effective contribution they possibly can to our society, no matter what the circumstances of their birth. I want all my constituents to be able to benefit from an excellent education. That must start, however, by enabling those born with disadvantages to overcome them and to flourish.

In many of the schools I visit in my constituency, I see teachers and staff striving to deliver those life chances to children and young people who face significant barriers to learning. However, I increasingly see disadvantage being reinforced rather than eliminated. That is being exacerbated by the policies being implemented by this Government. In the Knowsley Metropolitan Borough Council area no academic A-level provision is now available—none. That has happened because of funding arrangements that effectively require the same density of pupils who want to study academic A-levels in the most deprived areas as in the most affluent, when in reality there are likely to be fewer, at least until the attainment gap is closed, which in practice has proven stubbornly difficult to achieve.

Last year the last sixth form providing academic A-levels in the borough—Halewood Academy in my constituency—was closed because the school could not attract enough pupils to make it pay at a time when the forced academisation of the school meant that it had to balance its budget. I do not blame the headteacher or the governors for what happened, and I am glad that the academic achievements of the school improved this year—including, ironically, at A-level—but it is not right to make it harder for pupils from deprived areas to get easy access, in their local communities, to the opportunities that studying A-level subjects provide.

The barriers to success are already formidable, without making pupils travel out of area when they are less able to do so because of their families’ financial circumstances. In addition, I do not think it right that multi-academy trusts, all based and run from outside Knowsley MBC’s area, should be able in effect to choose which local pupils they wish to offer opportunities to with no accountability to local communities.

[Mr Howarth]

My hon. Friend is generous in giving way again. She, my hon. Friend the Member for St Helens South and Whiston (Ms Rimmer) and I have been pressing the Government to provide support for sixth-form A-level provision in the borough. Does she agree that if we do not get that, the effect on other secondary schools will also be detrimental?

[Maria Eagle]

I believe it will be—my right hon. Friend is correct. That is essential. I hope that we can make a difference and that the Government will come through to help us get academic A-level provision back in the borough, because if that does not happen, in due course—this will not take long—young families will not locate themselves in Knowsley. They will not think it is a place to bring up their kids unless there is a good chance of their staying in a school all the way through to do their A-levels and to go on to university from there.

Where is the accountability to local parents and communities in the existing arrangement? Knowsley no longer has any community secondary schools and all the academies are controlled by different MATs, all based outside the borough. The local council still has the obligation to provide for education in its area, but it has no levers whatever to pull to affect the provision, except for persuasion. The multi-academy trusts are all controlled elsewhere and will make decisions based on factors that may or may not matter to Knowsley communities but will certainly relate to the financial circumstances of their own organisations. In addition, when the council controlled schools, local people could vote out their councillors if they did not like developments. Now, there is no way for them to affect provision. The MATs have no accountability to the communities whose future they influence so greatly.

I worry that the school provision and funding structure developed by the Government can soon go wrong in areas where there is an attainment issue and can be hard to put right. I worry that provision is now being determined by financial considerations above all else. Communities such as those in my constituency need greater local provision to enable everyone to reach their potential, but that provision is in retreat. I worry that the phenomenon of the loss of sixth forms and academic A-level provision in Knowsley could continue to spread, and that young people soon will have less chance to go down that route if they do not live in a more affluent area that can easily meet the increasingly high numbers of pupils needed to provide academic A-levels.

I would like the Minister to assure me that he is aware of those problems and is determined to reverse those trends, so that young people from the communities of south Liverpool have no fewer chances to reach their potential than those who come from more advantaged areas. If he cannot do so, our education system will have lost one of its great features: the ability to facilitate social mobility and life chances for those whose family circumstances may not give them such opportunities. We will all be poorer for that.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Minister for School Standards (Nick Gibb)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship once again, Sir Edward. I congratulate the hon. Member for Garston and Halewood (Maria Eagle) on securing this important debate. As she said, we recently met to discuss in detail the funding position of schools in her constituency, and I welcome this opportunity to continue that discussion.

Debating this issue is welcome at a time when the Government have recently announced an increase in school funding, as well as the details of the historic new national funding formula. The Government want to ensure that all children, regardless of where they live, receive a world-class education. Over the past seven years, we have made significant progress: more schools than ever before are rated by Ofsted as good or outstanding, and the attainment gap between those from advantaged and disadvantaged backgrounds is beginning to close.

That progress has been made despite an unfair national funding system that has failed to take account of significant changes in the challenges faced by schools in different parts of the country. For too long, the unfair distribution of funding between schools has acted, I believe, as a brake on the progress they have been able to make. That is why it is so important that we are delivering on our promise to reform the unfair, opaque and outdated school and high-needs funding systems and introduce a national funding formula.

[Mr Howarth]

I think it is agreed on both sides that the existing funding formula is unfair. Part of the case that my hon. Friend the Member for Garston and Halewood (Maria Eagle) and I have made is that the recent adjustments somehow succeeded in making it even more unfair for some schools. That does not seem to be a sensible way to deal with this.