School Funding (London)

Jim Fitzpatrick Excerpts

Wednesday 29th March 2017 Westminster Hall

[Jim Fitzpatrick (Poplar and Limehouse) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to see you presiding over us this morning, Mr Hanson. I am not sure I have had the privilege of serving under your chairmanship before. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes) on securing this debate and commend her for her excellent speech, which detailed the problems we all face.

I do not have a long record of speaking in education debates over the years. As the Minister knows, my main engagement with his Department has been about fire sprinklers in schools and trying to improve the guidance on their installation. We have not cracked that yet. However, I have been contacted by a number of primary school heads in my constituency. Their comments need to be registered not only with me but by me in this debate. I will do so briefly, in line with your request, Mr Hanson. I have also written to the Secretary of State.

Heads from Cubitt Town Junior School, Mayflower Primary School, Cyril Jackson Primary School, Lansbury Lawrence Primary School, Arnhem Wharf Primary and St Peter’s London Docks Primary School, as well as constituents, have contacted me on this issue. One letter said:

“the national funding formula has the potential to make school funding fairer, but it will fall short unless it is given sufficient resources to succeed. School budgets are being pushed beyond breaking point.”

That brief quote says a lot. Given the pressures faced by schools, the writer of the letter is still able to see the positives in the funding formula, but refers to how it is let down by the sheer lack of resources. In her letter to me, the headteacher of Cyril Jackson Primary School listed 12 ways in which the school was forced to act to reduce overheads in 2015-16, meaning reduced staff numbers, less guidance, less encouragement and fewer opportunities to see new things, and experience other environments and be inspired by them.

My hon. Friend the Member for Dulwich and West Norwood has previously said, and may have said again this morning:

“The government is putting our excellent local schools at risk, with a change in the funding formula which will see money taken away from our local schools to give to schools in other parts of the country.”

Neither I nor any other colleague, I am sure, would wish to see schools in other parts of the UK short-changed, but giving them what they need to deliver a great education service should not be at the expense of London schools. Children everywhere should have and must enjoy an equally high standard of education. Whether they live in Dulwich, Docklands, Dudley or Droitwich, children deserve well-funded schools that enable them to reach their potential. It is as simple as that.

Those on the ground are telling me that school budgets are being pushed beyond breaking point. One of our local representatives in Tower Hamlets, Councillor Danny Hassell, recently tweeted that he had just seconded a Labour motion at the council against Government plans to cut funding in our schools that will mean a staggering loss of £511 per pupil in Tower Hamlets. Children such as those at Cubitt Town Junior School cannot afford the Government’s proposals. Their headteacher tells me it is calculated that Cubitt Town pupils will lose up to £746 per pupil.

[Mr Gibb]

I am listening carefully to the hon. Gentleman. Does he acknowledge that Tower Hamlets was the highest funded local authority in the country on a per-pupil basis before the national funding formula and remains so, even after the national funding formula is implemented, with funding of £6,718 per pupil, compared with £4,329 in Surrey and £5,129 in Waltham Forest?

[Jim Fitzpatrick]

I am grateful to the Minister for citing those statistics. I was citing one myself from the headteacher of Cubitt Town Junior School, who said that Cubitt Town pupils will lose up to £746 per pupil. I do not doubt that Tower Hamlets’ schools are well resourced and well funded by the Government, but the cuts being introduced will be unsustainable. The headteacher says that it could mean the school losing up to six teachers. How will that Isle of Dogs school withstand such a reduction without significant negative consequences for the quality of education it can give to local children?

Along with parliamentary colleagues, I urge the Government to acknowledge that their funding plans do not work for Cubitt Town, for the other schools I have mentioned or for all those left unmentioned. They certainly do not work for Tower Hamlets.

--- Later in debate ---

[James Berry (Kingston and Surbiton) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hanson, and to follow the hon. Member for Mitcham and Morden (Siobhain McDonagh). I congratulate the hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes) on securing this excellent debate.

My parents are teachers, and I have had the pleasure of visiting every school in my constituency at least once. We have the best schools in the UK in terms of the proportion of good or outstanding schools and GCSE and A-level results, and we also have grammar schools. They suffer the same pressures as schools do everywhere else in London. I want to speak briefly about the funding formula and other funding pressures that schools face, but I will say at the outset that I would be an advocate for more funding for schools—that should be a priority. As a Parliamentary Private Secretary for the Department of Health, I sit here in countless debates asking for more funding for the NHS—indeed I sit in debates asking for more funding for all other areas of public spending, and see colleagues ask for more funding across the board—but what I would focus on is more funding for education. We cannot just demand more funding for everything; we have to identify where we would raise the additional revenue or what we would cut.

The funding formula came about after a cross-party campaign that was premised on an agreement that the funding for schools was not fair, in the sense that it was not equitably distributed and that different parts of the country with similar demographic profiles were seeing different funding for their schools. The campaign was never based on levelling up to the level of schools funding in the highest funded area—Tower Hamlets. That would have added billions of pounds to the cost of the funding that is required for schools, and no party committed to that in their manifesto. In any new funding formula there are going to be winners and losers. I expected that, as the third worst funded borough in London, we would be a winner, although I had hoped that it would have been by more than 0.9%, with some schools’ funding going down.

Having followed this and other debates on the funding formula carefully, I have not actually heard any coherent criticisms of the general approach to the funding formula in terms of the per pupil funding and the additional factors. No one seems to disagree that those are the right factors. What they disagree with is that, as a result, some schools’ funding is going down. Personally, I would like to have seen a more radical approach, because that would have ended the unfair and inequitable situation that schools in Tower Hamlets, 14 miles away from my constituency, receive £2,406 per pupil more than schools in Kingston, on top of the pupil premium, which is not counted in those figures.

[Jim Fitzpatrick]

indicated assent.

[James Berry]

The hon. Gentleman is nodding. Before I am intervened on by an MP from Tower Hamlets, I completely accept the political consensus that we should address social deprivation through funding for education. I completely accept that schools in Kingston are always going to get less than schools in Tower Hamlets, where there is a higher index of social deprivation. However, if we take into account the pupil premium figures and the differential in the same city of £2,400 per pupil, that is simply not fair. In my stage 2 response to the fairer funding consultation, I asked that the per pupil funding element should not be reduced to a weighting below the current 76%, unless significant additional funding is identified for the additional factors.

I want to touch on the other pressures beyond the fairer funding formula. I have spoken to many of my headteachers in Kingston, and frankly their concern is not with the fairer funding formula primarily, but with the other pressures on their budgets. Some of those have been mentioned. They include increased employers’ national insurance contributions, increased pension contributions, increased national living wage, the apprenticeship levy, the equalisation of sixth-form and further education funding, the reduction in the education services grant and a general increase in costs.

Another factor that I imagine affects other hon. Members as well, and certainly has a profound effect in Kingston, is the huge overspend in high-needs funding. It has resulted, as in other boroughs, in Kingston having to top-slice the dedicated schools grant to the level of the minimum funding guarantee. It is a demand that Kingston’s schools and Kingston Council are not really in a position to regulate, because a lot of the high-cost, private school, out-of-borough placements—sometimes of more than £200,000 per pupil—are made by the first-tier tribunal for special educational needs. Kingston Council is trying hard to address the issue by supporting applications for two new free schools—two special schools, one in Kingston and one in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Twickenham (Dr Mathias)—so that we can better deal with high-needs children in borough, but this matter needs to be addressed. We need more funding for high-needs provision in particular.