School Funding: Special Educational Needs

Lord Storey Excerpts

Thursday 23rd May 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, it would be remiss not to thank the Minister for her time in that role. She has always been courteous and on top of her brief. I think she is just a decent person, actually. As she said, the Sutton Trust’s is a highly respected annual report on the state of schooling in this country. I do not think anybody can be unaware that schools are struggling with budgets and having to move money around. One of the biggest findings that concerns me in that report is that there has been a 74% cut in funding towards teaching assistants. These are the lifeblood of any school, particularly in supporting children with special educational needs. Presumably the new Minister’s in-tray will have to deal with this problem. Does this Minister not accept that we need to sort out the funding properly for all our schools?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

We give schools a great deal of discretion over how they use their budgets. It is right that we want the experts who know their community to use funds as they see fit, and the noble Lord knows from his own experience that schools use these budgets in very different ways. I was in a school recently which actually no longer used teaching assistants, but had dropped the class size dramatically as a result. It had teachers but a much smaller number of pupils in the class. The underlying principle, that we should trust our trusts and school leaders on how they spend the budget, is the one that any Government should support.