Grammar School Funding

Gregory Campbell Excerpts

Tuesday 13th January 2015 Westminster Hall

[Damian Green]

We all agree that we want fair funding. It is not an easy issue and Ministers in this and previous Governments have grappled with it. The principle that we all start from is that allowing all children to reach the full extent of their potential must be the aim of every school.

When the rhetoric and emotion that have begun to enter this debate, and which have gone on for decades, are stripped away, all grammar schools are is specialist academic schools. Under successive Governments, we have thought it a good thing to allow schools to specialise in music, sport, science, maths or languages, but the one thing that the education establishment has never allowed schools to specialise in is academic excellence. That has always seemed completely perverse: we allow schools to specialise, but not at being good in schoolwork.

[Mr Gregory Campbell (East Londonderry) (DUP)]

The right hon. Gentleman is discussing specialising in academic excellence. In Northern Ireland we have attempted to do that. Does he agree that grammar schools in England, as in Northern Ireland, need to continue to do more to dispel the perception of elitism that continues to dog the sector?

[Damian Green]

Absolutely. There is a different debate to be had about how grammar schools can attract children from across the economic and social spectrum. They are particularly successful at attracting students from minority communities in the UK, which is hugely welcome—and, I suspect, illustrates how committed to the education of their children such communities are. As I say, however, that is a separate debate. The point of this one is that grammar schools and other schools with large sixth forms deserve a fair funding regime, along with all other schools.

A number of complex interactions have led to the unfairness. The Minister needs to address two basic issues: first, that post-16 funding is not protected in the way that the rest of the schools budget is, so that any school with a large and growing sixth form is in a financial straitjacket—grammar schools in particular are disadvantaged, but not only them. Secondly, there is the wide amount of local variation that has arisen, again from perfectly good motives. That can be illustrated in a number of ways.

Some of us attended a meeting of grammar school heads and I was struck by one of the illustrations, which comes from Buckinghamshire, although I am sure the same would apply in Lincolnshire, Kent or other areas in which there are many grammar schools. We were shown what would happen if a Buckinghamshire school moved next door: if it moved to Oxfordshire, it would gain 6% in funding and if it moved to West Berkshire, it would gain 8%. If it moved to nearby urban areas, it would gain even more—in Reading, it would gain a 10% uplift and in Luton it would gain 18%. One can understand all the reasons why such disparities might have arisen, but it is not unreasonable for the heads of successful schools to observe the situation as an unfairness from which they suffer in their daily lives.

One of the reasons why I wanted to contribute to the debate was the effect of unfairness on the day-to-day teaching at the two grammar schools in my constituency, Highworth and Norton Knatchbull. Mr Paul Danielsen, the head teacher of Highworth, told me that, despite being oversubscribed, having full classes and having made staffing reductions and other economies, the school can no longer offer the full range of provision. He thought that some schools, at the extreme, might not be able to operate at all—I think that that is unlikely, but it is a possibility. We are talking about the cumulative effect of funding decisions.