School Funding: Stockport

Jim Shannon Excerpts

Wednesday 14th October 2026 Westminster Hall

[Lisa Smart (Hazel Grove) (LD)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered school funding in Stockport.

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Mr Stuart. I start by declaring an interest: I am in my 20th year of being an unpaid primary school governor. I am currently at the wonderful Fairway primary school in Offerton.

I am sure that we all agree that being an MP is a real privilege, and one of the best things that we get to do in this job is spend time in schools. Young people get to the nub of issues. They have very little filter, and they always leave me feeling much more positive about the future of our country. However, the school visits that I have made since being elected have included conversations with headteachers who—while they are doing remarkable things for their pupils and their school communities—are having to explain which posts they cannot fill, which support they have had to cut and which requests from parents they have had to turn down because the money is just not there.

The chief executive of the Honeycomb education trust, which includes Mellor primary school in my patch, told me that he had recently been left with three choices: lose three or four members of staff, lose a headteacher or take early retirement himself. He chose retirement. That is what the funding position is doing to experienced and celebrated school leaders such as Jim in my constituency.

Schools across Stockport are expected to provide the same educational experience for students as the rest of the country. Yet schools in my constituency and across the borough are funded at disproportionately lower levels per pupil compared with other places, including neighbouring Manchester. That is the case for much of the rest of the country.

Funding for our education system can be complex. Education has two core funding streams: the education cash limit budget, which comes through the council, and the dedicated schools grant, which is the core funding provided by central Government through the Department for Education for education purposes. That budget reaches schools mainly according to the number of pupils that are enrolled. Other considerations are also taken into account, including deprivation, number of children on free school meals, number of children with English as an additional language and low prior attainment.

The rate attached to each child, and the number of children in the school, decides almost everything about a school’s budget. The primary schools’ unit of funding in Manchester is £6,404. In neighbouring Stockport, it is £5,623. It does not cost almost £800 more to educate a child in Manchester than it does in Stockport, and it is hard to justify that big gap.

At secondary schools, the funding in Manchester averages £8,452. Stockport receives £7,320. That is a gap of £1,100 for every pupil and is £350 less than the national average. We are not just a little bit below the average in Stockport. Among all the authorities in England, Stockport’s secondary rate is one of the lowest in the country. At the top of the table are the inner London boroughs, some of which receive over £10,000 per pupil. The distance between the top of that table and those areas near the bottom is hard to defend.

Those differences in funding are having a dire effect in Stockport. I have been told that 68 of the 78 schools in Stockport are heading for a deficit, and that school reserves have fallen from £11 million to around £5 million. The schools that are attempting to remain financially resilient are joining multi-academy trusts based outside Stockport, and others are being pushed towards mergers.

When speaking to Jim from the Honeycomb education trust, he laid out the additional burdens that school leaders are facing in addition to limited funding. Those include the removal of the trust capacity fund, national insurance contributions that were not fully funded, long-term staff sickness absence and a growing number of children with special educational needs.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I commend the hon. Lady for securing this debate. On special educational needs in particular, it is a very similar story in Northern Ireland where there has been historical underfunding. Does she share my concern about how some of the press are carrying stories about the number of people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder? They are almost suggesting that the ADHD numbers are not correct. In my constituency, I can see clearly that the number of people with ADHD is rising. I have six grandchildren, and three have some educational challenges. Does the hon. Lady share my concern that the ADHD figures are rising and are correct?

[Lisa Smart]

I, too, have family members with ADHD diagnoses. We as a society have got much better at understanding neurodiversity. We understand the strengths of those who are neurodiverse and how best to educate and work with them. I agree with the hon. Gentleman that a better understanding of our fellow citizens is a good thing, and if that comes with a diagnosis, let us welcome that.

Councils receive a high-needs budget to pay for specialist places and extra support in mainstream schools. In Stockport, that came to just over £56 million this year, with more than 1,100 students holding high-needs places last year. That brings me to the deficit on the high-needs budget, which hangs over councils across England, and which Stockport knows well.

By March 2027, the cumulative deficit on Stockport’s dedicated schools grant is expected to reach about £68 million. Because of the statutory override, that sum sits in an unusable reserve, rather than on the council’s balance sheet, where it could be put to better use. The Government have said that, as part of their wider reforms to special educational needs provision, they will write off 90% of the accrued deficit at March 2027. For Stockport, that is an estimated £61 million, so of course I welcome that. It is the right thing to do, and councils have been asking for it for years. However, the override is due to end in March 2028, with a new funding model due to begin in April 2028. In between, Stockport expects to build up a further deficit of about £60 million across 2026-27 and 2027-28. The Government have said that more support will be confirmed, but that puts councils and schools in a difficult position, as they have to set budgets without knowing whether a sum almost as large as the first write-off will be covered. Schools and councils want to work with a clear understanding of what they should expect.

The council and families across the borough deserve better than that uncertainty. Parents of children with special educational needs should be provided with the certainty that school places will be available to them and that they do not have to worry about whether they will be funded. They should not be told that it depends on a funding model that is yet to be published. I would be really grateful if the Minister can update us on when schools should expect publication of the new funding model.

Funding disparities can disproportionately affect students from low socioeconomic backgrounds. Stockport is one of the most polarised boroughs in the country. We have communities that are among the most affluent in the region, and we also have the most deprived ward in the whole of Greater Manchester. Children in that ward start school with disadvantages that, on average, will never pick up. A funding system that sees only the prosperous areas of a borough and sets the rate to match lets down those children. That is why Stockport is a founder member of the f40 group—the campaign of the lowest-funded local authorities—which has pressed for years for a fairer distribution of education funding. The case has not changed. The gaps mean that an average one-form-entry primary school in Stockport receives about £164,000 less each year than it would if it were based in Manchester. Headteachers in my constituency cannot simply absorb such a gap.

The pressure is not only on budgets. In Marple and the surrounding villages, families living in the catchment area of Marple Hall school find that their children are not offered a place because the school is oversubscribed.