School Funding

Heidi Allen Excerpts

Wednesday 25th January 2017 Commons Chamber

[Heidi Allen (South Cambridgeshire) (Con)]

Of course I commend the Government’s determination to build a new schools’ funding formula, but I am pleased it is still at the consultation stage.

Representing South Cambridgeshire—a constituency in a county that, until 2015, was the lowest funded in the country and had been for decades—I understand only too well how underfunded schools have struggled. The proposed new formula, though it has laudable intentions to focus on deprivation and poor educational attainment, does not yet recognise three additional critical factors. First and foremost, consideration must be given when a school has been seriously underfunded for decades. My schools have been mending and making do for years—I do not exaggerate when I describe broken window panes and holes in roofs. For us, teaching assistants are a luxury, and the purchasing of text books and even basic equipment is the ask of local businesses and the community. It is not a question of cutting teaching assistants—filling even core teacher vacancies is often not possible.

The Government showed an appreciation of that when they provided a small but welcome interim funding boost last year and this year, but I am afraid that the reality is that the money has been completely absorbed in pension and national insurance increases. Furthermore, under the current funding proposals, not only will this interim funding not be maintained as a starting baseline, but 27 of my schools would be even worse off, with a real-terms cut of about 4%. Every one of my rural primary schools with fewer than 150 pupils would lose money, and Members have spoken today about sparsity. So I urge the Secretary of State to recognise that the new formula, though built on many sensible principles, cannot simply be superimposed on a landscape of significant historical under-investment—not if we expect those schools to survive, let alone to halt and close the widening free school meals attainment gap.

I now turn to the additional financial pressures experienced by areas of high growth, which we have also heard about today. In the next four years, we will have opened 24 new schools in Cambridgeshire since 2012 just to cope with basic need. It is not right that we subsidise that in the early years with money from existing schools. For example, a typical secondary school would contribute £41,000 out of its annual budget towards it. I recognise that the consultation is open-ended about growth and how we should deal with it, but we clearly need to find a way of fixing this, perhaps through a separate fund to help these schools in the early years.

Finally, I ask that we look at the cost of living. In Cambridgeshire, particularly South Cambs and the city, house prices are about 16 times the average wage, so we need to think about how we can help with teacher recruitment, because people’s budgets simply do not go that far.

Having spoken to the Secretary of State, I believe that there is genuinely a sincere desire to offer up this proposed model for road testing, and that is what we are doing today—we are kicking the tyres.

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[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (The Cotswolds) (Con)]

For reasons that will become evident to the House, I am particularly grateful to have caught your eye in this debate, Mr Speaker. I commend the Secretary of State for tackling this issue, because it is quite clear from the debate that, in a modification of the Lincoln dictum, on this issue one can only please some of the people some of the time. Inevitably, when there is no more cash around, there will be winners and losers. Unfortunately, my constituency is one of the big losers.

I campaigned with the f40 group for over 10 years, and the absolute sun on the horizon was the national funding formula, but now that the consultation on the formula has arrived I find that my schools will actually get less money. In Gloucestershire, we will get a 0.8% cash-terms increase this year, and in the Cotswolds, there will be a 0.3% cash-terms increase. Two thirds of my schools will get a cut, and a third of them will get a very small increase.

In Gloucestershire, schools were already very efficient. They had amalgamated a lot of back-office functions and had formed partnerships. The secondary schools had done everything they could to become academies, being among the earliest in the country to do so. Gloucestershire is therefore a very efficient county, but we now find that our schools will get cash-terms cuts. That is on top of the Government having imposed limits on above inflation increases in relation to funding teachers, the national minimum wage, pensions, national insurance and procurement. A cash-terms cut for over half my schools means a real squeeze on education in Gloucestershire.

I should pay tribute to the parents and governors of my schools, because the vast majority go well beyond the extra mile to give my children the very best education. As a result, on very meagre funding, we get reasonable results in Gloucestershire. However, the figures I have given from the consultation will put Gloucestershire down from 108th to 116th in the f40 league. That is simply unacceptable because it means that some teacher posts will definitely be lost, and it is likely that some of my smaller schools will close.

[Heidi Allen]

Will my hon. Friend do what I am doing, which is to encourage all my governors, teachers and parents to feed into the consultation? I suspect there are some anomalies because it is the same in my area, in that we expected more and it has not been delivered.

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

I do urge all people to do so. My hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham (Alex Chalk) is sitting beside me, and I am sure that all Gloucestershire’s MPs will feed into the consultation. I am also sure that many of my aggrieved headteachers, parents and governors will do so.

It is inevitable that some of my secondary schools, which face some of the largest cuts, will have to reduce the breadth of the curriculum they currently offer. That would be unfair because every child in the country should have roughly the same breadth of curriculum in their schools. I accept that that is often difficult in smaller secondary schools, but it will be very hard for children and their parents to bear if their A-level choices are no longer available as a result of Government policy.

I simply say to my hon. Friend the Minister that I know this is a consultation, but I am looking for some very radical changes. The weighting for deprivation and other measures in the consultation is too high, and the basic pupil funding should never in any circumstances be cut.