School Funding

Lord Herbert of South Downs Excerpts

Thursday 5th November 2015 Westminster Hall

[Nick Herbert (Arundel and South Downs) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness (Graham Stuart) on securing the debate, along with the right hon. Member for Exeter (Mr Bradshaw), and for the way in which he has run this campaign and made his case.

This is a basic issue of fairness. I am sure that hon. Members will all be competing today to explain how poorly our schools are funded, but few will do better than me in that respect, because although West Sussex might be seen as a leafy and affluent county, it is not entirely so—there are significant pockets of deprivation, though less so in my constituency. West Sussex has a schools block unit of funding—so, per-pupil funding—of £4,198, which makes it the fourth worst-funded authority in England. Not only is that level of funding well below the England average of £4,612, but it puts us below our neighbours East Sussex, which has £4,442, and Surrey, which has £4,300, and of course well below the very well funded urban authorities, of which the City of London, with £8,587—double the funding of West Sussex—comes right at the top. If West Sussex were funded just at the average level for all county councils, our schools would receive an additional £15 million per annum. If we were funded at the level of our statistical neighbours—similar authorities—we would receive nearly £12 million per annum more. Our position is relatively very poor.

Some evidence of that can be seen in teacher-pupil ratios. Let us look at the United Learning academies and its urban schools. The Paddington academy has a pupil-teacher ratio of 1:8, whereas the Lambeth academy has a pupil-teacher of 1:12. At Midhurst Rother college, the first rural academy, serving my constituency in West Sussex, the pupil ratio is 1:17. Steyning grammar school, which is not, in fact a grammar school, serves my constituency and is in the state sector. It has a pupil-teacher ratio of just under 1:17.

The figures I have given include the pupil premium; nevertheless, the disparity is very substantial. In an environment of flat cash, despite the fact that spending in this area has been relatively protected by this Government—that was a manifesto commitment—compared with other budgets, such as the police budget, which are being very substantially cut as we all know, additional pressures are finding their way to schools for such things as national insurance and pension costs. It will be hard for schools to deal with flat cash if their funding is already on the floor. What heads and chairs of governors from schools in my constituency are saying to me is that they already face a difficult position because of the relatively poor funding.

We are grateful for the £390 million uplift that the Government have so far provided and to which the Minister rightly drew our attention. However, in West Sussex, that means that we received less than £1 million a year more, whereas the actual gap, if we were funded at the average level of county councils, is something like £15 million.

I do not believe that there is necessarily a link between public sector performance and resourcing. We cannot always say that improving public services means giving them more money, but I think that we are making it harder for schools when they are funded at the level that they are and when the unfairness is so manifest. This is not about politics—about proposing a political solution. It is about an objective level of unfairness. I therefore welcome both the Government’s manifesto commitment to deal with the problem, and the fact that the Minister has been so ready to listen to me and my colleagues in West Sussex about the unfairness. I urge the Minister to listen to what hon. Members are saying today: what we now need is a realisation of the manifesto commitment with an announcement in the spending review about redressing the unfairness in a timetabled way, so that we can prove that we do believe in fair funding for schools across the country.