School Funding

Layla Moran Excerpts

Wednesday 24th October 2018 Westminster Hall

[Mrs Main]

I completely accept the picture that the hon. Lady paints. If we are here to do anything, it is to try to move forward consensually—education is not a hot potato that we can repeatedly pick up and drop. She mentioned statementing for children with special educational needs. Parents tell me that there is sometimes reluctance to statement a child because of the extra resources that should automatically be associated with that. We must look into that, too.

Instead of stepping in and helping SEN children, some mainstream schools permanently exclude pupils, as the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale mentioned, and academies such as Links in my constituency pick up the pieces. As a result of funding pressures, mainstream schools do not always have the staff or resources to care for those children. I have heard parents say that when they contact a mainstream school that has places—this is what the hon. Member for Nottingham South (Lilian Greenwood) referred to—but inform it that their child has a special educational need, they suddenly find that the place is no longer available. That is a primary concern for teachers, and I hope that the Minister will set out his plans to secure and correctly direct SEN teaching resources, which are absolutely needed.

[Layla Moran (Oxford West and Abingdon) (LD)]

Has the hon. Lady heard from her local schools, as I have, that one of the barriers to getting a statement in the first place is the severe underfunding of child and adolescent mental health services? It is necessary to go through CAMHS to secure an EHCP. The referral time used to be six months, which frankly is a long time in a young child’s life, but in Oxfordshire it now averages two years.

[Mrs Main]

If the hon. Lady secured a debate on CAMHS, I would attend it. I can testify that many parents in my constituency experience issues with CAMHS.

Staff and staffing costs are under severe pressure. Schools cite increased staffing costs, and the amount of their budget that those costs take up, as their main concern. WorthLess? surveyed headteachers as part of its fairer funding campaign and found that 60% had had to reduce their staff by one or more to balance their budget. That goes back to the pressures I mentioned.

Sandringham School in my constituency, which hosted the public meeting I attended—it was quite a rocky meeting, but I said I would bring back people’s concerns—explained to me its issues with staff pay rises, national insurance and pension contributions, and teacher recruitment shortfalls. Many schools across the country are grappling with those four key issues. In an area such as mine, where house prices and the cost of living are very high, wages sometimes just cannot keep up so that teachers are able to live in the constituency and work in its schools.

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[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for St Albans (Mrs Main) for securing this important debate, but there is a sense of déjà vu. Over the past few years I have participated in many debates in Westminster Hall and the main Chamber on school funding, and two years ago there was a debate specifically on school funding in West Sussex, which is what I will concentrate on today. As my hon. Friend said, progress has been made with the new funding formula, but for many of us that is just work in progress. It was a move in the right direction, but it has not yet reached the destination of genuinely fair funding.

West Sussex was able to secure an additional £29.8 million funding as part of the £1.3 billion that the Government added last year, but that must been seen in the context of pupil numbers that are up substantially and the funding pressures coming down the line, such as teachers’ pay, national insurance and the other points raised by my hon. Friend. We will all plead the case for our own areas, but West Sussex has consistently been at the bottom of the table. We were the second to lowest funded local authority in the country, and with the additional money we have now gone to being the eighth lowest funded per unit for primary schools, and the sixth lowest for secondary funding. We have gone from being at the bottom of the lowest decile to nearer the top of the lowest decile. There is still a long way to go, as the Minister will be only too aware, given that he, too, represents a West Sussex constituency.

There is great confusion about what has happened to funding in real terms. Many figures have been bandied around, with banners outside schools saying that West Sussex has lost x millions of pounds. Because of the funding formula and the complications of how the deprivation, prior attainment and rural sparsity factors work, we need greater clarity on exactly what we are getting and where the money is going.

[Layla Moran]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that no one on the frontline is arguing that more money is coming into the coffers of local schools?

[Tim Loughton]

Everybody is arguing that more money is coming into the coffers of local schools—that is plainly a fact. It is a question of how many pupils that money has to be spread across, increasing pressures on that funding, and what is left over to fund the basic education of children. It is no good saying that less money is going into schools; it is not. It is just not enough, given all those other factors.

In West Sussex we have the cumulative effect over many years of consistently being right at the bottom of the heap, so that all those savings have been used up years ago and many of my schools are running on empty. Despite that, many schools in my constituency are doing an outstanding job, such as Eastbrook Primary Academy in Southwick, St Nicolas and St Mary Primary in Shoreham, Shoreham Academy, Sompting Village School in Sompting, and Vale School in Worthing, to name just a few schools that have been consistently outstanding and good, despite all those factors. They are a mix of academies, faith schools and local authority schools—I give preference to no particular type of school, and indeed we have no free schools in my constituency. As has been said, there is a particular problem with special needs schools that are not covered by the new fair funding formula, although the numbers of pupils coming forward with severe educational needs has increased. Fantastic schools such as Herons Dale School in Shoreham are suffering huge pressures, and we are seeing the effect on pupils.

I want to concentrate on real examples, not just talk in the round. Last year I invited every head of every school in my constituency to a couple of roundtables to tell me exactly what was going on in their schools—it was not about fears of what might happen, but about what was going on and how they set their budgets there and then. This year I repeated that exercise with the chairs of governors from all schools in my constituency. As a result of those findings, I wrote a lengthy letter to the Education Secretary—I have just had a reply from the Minister—in which I gave real life examples.

There were many common factors, and in the consultation on the fair funding formula, 9% of 25,222 responses that the Department for Education received came from West Sussex. That hugely dis- proportionate figure shows how important this issue is in our part of the world. Common issues were that staffing costs, in some cases, were 90% of a school’s budget. Some years ago they would typically have been nearer 80%, and beyond that figure it becomes unsustainable for many schools. There have been many redundancies and fewer working hours, and non-returning maternity leave cases are commonplace. Senior leadership teams are covering classes to remove the need for supply teachers, and extracurricular activities and trips are being culled due to cost. Infrastructure investment and development is being delayed or ruled out completely.

Let me give a few examples from schools. One medium-sized primary school has reduced teaching assistant support by more than 200 hours and has not replaced its inclusion co-ordinator. It is unable to replace ageing and antiquated IT equipment. A junior school now has a deficit of £40,000, and will require an additional £220,000 for salaries over the next few years. Class sizes are typically 32 or 33 since 113 more pupils came into the school, yet there was an equivalent increase in full-time teachers of 0.8%. Schools are not losing funds because they are losing pupils; they are attracting pupils and yet they do not have the funds to get the teaching cover they need. The professional development budget was between £3,000 and £5,000, but it is now zero. The extended curriculum budget was around £20,000, but it is now £500. The learning resources budget was £120,000, and is now £35,000. There will be a deficit, and in that school 87% of expenditure is on staff salaries and overtime.

In a medium-sized primary school, non-qualified teachers such as high-level teaching assistants are being used to cover classes so that the school cuts the cost of supply staff, and numerous cuts to teaching assistant posts are creating greater workloads for teachers. Schools are unable to pay overtime. Counselling levels have fallen due to cutbacks, and that will be a soft target for further cuts in future. That is a particularly big worry to me because it will create greater pressures on those pupils who require greater attention and resources. They will then fall further behind at school, and they will not get the opportunity to make that time up if we do not deal with the issue soon. In too many cases the waiting list for counselling in school or beyond is many months, and during that time a condition can fester. I have many more practical examples. That is not scaremongering; this is going on now, and this is how governors and heads have to set their budgets to effect those constraints.

What can we do? I have three suggestions. First, the Minister absolutely must lobby as part of the comprehensive spending review and say that the shortfall in funding is a false economy in the extreme. Secondly, it was disappointing that the full teachers’ pay was not covered centrally—just the additional pay over that 1%, and there have been questions about some teachers not getting that full coverage over the 1%. Finally, I suggest that West Sussex, and other coastal areas where there are particular problems of deprivation and high costs, should have something like a coastal communities challenge fund, just as the London Challenge fund in 2003 addressed some of the difficulties in places where affluent areas mask areas of real deprivation, such as those found typically on the south coast, the Kent coast and other parts of the country. I ask the Government to look seriously at addressing the serious deficit in parts of the country such as West Sussex, because we are feeling the effects of it now.

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[Layla Moran (Oxford West and Abingdon) (LD)]

Here we are again, talking about school funding. It feels to me, as education spokesperson for my party, that it is all I have had a chance to speak about since being elected and taking this post. There is more to a school than just its funding. The problem is that the funding crisis started badly and, over the past two years in particular, it has got worse and worse, to the point that it is now the top concern of both parents and teachers when they contact me. It used to be other things, such as Ofsted and exams, when people were focusing on the curriculum. The debate about school funding has meant that the life has been sucked out of the broader debate and the vision that we should have for education in this country.

As many people here know, I used to be a teacher, but I continue to be a governor of a local school, Botley Primary School. That is important so that I can see with my own eyes the funding pressures on schools. I absolutely agree with the examples given by the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) and thank him for his helpful contribution to today’s debate. The point is that these are not theoretical cuts, which could happen. We sometimes look at the headline figures and forget the effect that they have on the frontline. I also very much thank the hon. Member for St Albans (Mrs Main) for securing this important debate. Although sometimes it feels as though we are in “Groundhog Day”, the most important thing we can ever do is provide a good education for the next generation in this country.

I would like to talk about numbers. As many people know, I was a maths teacher, and I have to say that I was disappointed—to use a teacher’s phrase—when it was uncovered that the Government’s claim that we are spending the third highest amount on education of any country in the OECD was pulled up by the UK Statistics Authority as not true, because the number included contributions by private schools and student loans. When the Government talk about how much “we” spend, any ordinary person outside the House—our constituents—would think that they are talking about public spending, and that it does not include money spent on top of that by those parents who want to send their children to private schools.

When I toured the schools in my constituency during the recess, as I am sure many other hon. Members did, the private schools themselves were appalled that they were being used in that way, because there is solidarity among members of the teaching profession, whether in private or state schools. The feeling was that the numbers were being conflated in that way to hide the fact that the UK is not third but 14th, which is rather different. The UK Statistics Authority therefore expressed its serious concerns, and it was also disappointing that the Secretary of State wrote to us all essentially to defend the claim.

The issue was about not just those numbers, but numbers about reading attainment. The statistic that more children than ever go to good or outstanding schools is not the full picture either, because it does not quite take into account the inflation in the numbers of students—the population increase—or the fact that, as we explored in the Public Accounts Committee, large numbers of outstanding schools have not been inspected for the best part of 10 years, so whether they continue to be outstanding is up for debate.

Sir David Norgrove, chair of the UKSA, went on to say:

“I am sure you”—

this was to the Department—

“share my concerns that instances such as these do not help to promote trust and confidence in official data, and indeed risk undermining them.”

Therefore, my first ask of the Minister today is simply this: can he give this guarantee about official statistics from now on? I appreciate that the Government want to put a positive spin on what is—let us face it—a very difficult time for teachers and headteachers, but can he at least say that any further statistics coming out of the Department will be in line with the code of practice set by the UK Statistics Authority? I ask that because without the actual numbers, without us all knowing what we are talking about, it is very hard to have a proper debate. This should be a cross-party debate; a child’s life in education will span several colours of Government, so it is important that we get the figures right.

As other hon. Members have said, there are many reasons for the current situation. It is an equation: money in versus money out. The money out, which ends up on the frontline of teaching, is less than it ought to be. In fact, when we take into account inflation, rising student numbers, national insurance contributions, the apprenticeship levy and so on, the estimate is that we are £2.8 billion behind where we should be, given all those extra burdens, compared with 2015.

We are seeing examples of all this in our schools. Let me give the example from my constituency of Thameside Primary School, which services one of the most deprived areas in the country—they exist in Oxford West and Abingdon, too, even though that is not always obvious. These schools are not now using their pupil premium money to do things such as fund trips. They try to do that, but actually what they are doing now is employing link workers to help families to access basic benefits. They do not update the books in their library, because they cannot. Meanwhile, local authority cuts have meant that mobile libraries no longer bring the new books to the children of the school. They have had to cut forest school. I do not know whether other hon. Members have forest school in their constituencies, but it is incredibly important and I wish I had had it in my school. At Thameside Primary School they have had to cut it completely. In other schools in my constituency they have reduced the hours, because they do not have enough members of staff to service it.

The Conservative manifesto said that £4 billion would be put into schools by 2022. How close are we to achieving that manifesto commitment? I would get behind it—let us all get together and put extra money into schools. The former Secretary of State attributed £1.3 billion to the education budget. In the Public Accounts Committee we have been asking the Department where that money will come from, and we are yet to get an answer for about half of it. It was all to come from within the existing budget and through the cancellations of some programmes, but at the time of questioning about half of it was still unaccounted for, so I ask the Minister: where will that money come from?

There are broader consequences to this lack of funding for our schools, particularly the paring down of the curriculum. We now have schools that no longer offer the full range of modern foreign languages and creative subjects. Those students who—God forbid—do not love maths and science, which was the case even in my classroom, need the full range of opportunities to succeed. The unfortunate fact is that in the current state of affairs schools are paring down what they are able to offer and providing fewer opportunities for students to get on. I ask the Minister: is education a funding priority for this Government? What has he asked the Chancellor to give to education in the Budget? Can he give a commitment, genuinely, that every school in this country will be able to offer the full-range curriculum, which we want all children to have access to?