School Funding

John Redwood Excerpts

Thursday 25th April 2019 Commons Chamber

[John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)]

I represent parts of West Berkshire Council area and parts of Wokingham Borough Council area. Both councils face exactly the same problems with schools. In both cases, we receive very low amounts per pupil compared with the national average, so we cannot provide as varied or as richly resourced a curriculum as better-endowed schools.

The biggest problem we face, which I hope the Minister and his colleagues will address urgently, is on high needs. It should be the area we are keenest to help on. The pupils who require that special support need to be properly supported financially from the centre, as well as supported by local professionals. In West Berkshire, I am advised that there will be over 9% more pupils needing that support this year but that its budget has gone up by 0.5%. How does the Minister think we will manage to pay for all those extra pupils who need that extra support when the budget is so meanly set?

In Wokingham, too, there is quite rapid growth in the numbers requiring support and very little growth in the money being made available. Wokingham has the additional problem that because we are an extremely fast-growing part of the country—we are taking a large number of new houses—we are way behind in putting in the necessary educational provision for special needs, so Wokingham now has to find facilities for 119 special needs pupils outside the borough because nobody has bothered to make the money available so that we can catch up. It would be better, and probably better value, if more of that provision could be local, close to where the children and their parents live, but this is not an option, given the delay.

I have raised with the Minister before the issue of general schools funding, which has been made more difficult by the rapid growth in pupil numbers. I am pleased to say that we now have a new secondary school and three new primary schools, which have gone in relatively recently to catch up with the backlog in the provision of places for this very fast-growing part of the country. That creates its own financial problems, however, which the Minister and his system do not recognise. First, there is a delay in getting the money in for the new schools as the provision goes in, so the budgets of the other schools are squeezed.

Secondly, when we at last get a new secondary school, for example, it makes a lot of places available all in one go, because it establishes itself with a certain capacity, and then pupils are attracted to that school—perfectly reasonably—and are taken away from other schools, and those schools then face an immediate cut in the amount of money they have, because suddenly they do not have the right number of pupils to sustain the budgets. It takes time to slim down their offer, and sometimes it is very painful and difficult, but again the system is simply too inflexible to recognise this basic requirement of the system.

If it means that we have a few more places to give parents more choice, that is good, but I am a realist—you have to pay for it, Minister. We expect the Minister to do so, representing as he does a Government who say they believe in parental choice and high standards for pupils in state schools. That is something the Minister and I entirely agree about. If I am ever tempted to give a talk to or visit an independent school, and if I go to the really well-endowed ones, I see a different world in terms of the library resources, the range of curriculum offers, the sporting facilities and the support they get—because money does buy something better. I want the pupils who go to state schools in West Berkshire and Wokingham to have access to the best, but we simply cannot do that on the current budget.

Minister, the Government should stop trying to give £39 billion to the European Union to delay our exit for two to four years, when the public voted to get out. Let us get hold of the money, Minister, and put it where it matters: into social care and schools and into tax cuts for hard-pressed families so they can provide more for their own children. That is what the public want. Get on with it, Minister!