John Pugh
Main Page: John Pugh (Liberal Democrat - Southport)Department Debates - View all John Pugh's debates with the Department for Education
(8 years, 5 months ago)
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Mr Gibb
We have protected school funding on a per-pupil basis. School funding is now at £40 billion—the highest it has ever been, and £4 billion more than in 2011-12. Because of the decisions that the Chancellor took in his Budgets, particularly the June 2010 Budget, we are not facing, and have not faced, the crisis facing countries such as Greece that had the same deficit as a percentage of the budget. We have not faced their crisis of closing schools, slashing salaries, and cutting numbers of teachers; we have maintained stability in our system. The average class size has remained stable in that period despite the fact that we have also created 600,000 more school places.
John Pugh (Southport) (LD)
There is a section of the Government that does not believe in experts, but, for the record, is the Minister really contradicting the Institute for Fiscal Studies, which predicts an 8% fall by 2020 in school budgets, in real terms?
Mr Gibb
We are aware that there are costs that schools have to face in the coming years, but we have protected school funding. If we look across Whitehall, we see the reduction in spending that we have had to secure to tackle the record public sector deficit that we inherited in 2010—£156 billion, or 11% of GDP. It is now down to less than 4% of GDP, thanks to those savings. We have issued significant guidance to schools about how they can manage their budgets and procure savings and efficiencies in the way they run their schools to meet these challenges.