School Funding

Mark Garnier Excerpts

Tuesday 24th April 2012 Westminster Hall

[Richard Graham]

Yes, apart from an alarming analogy with Martin Luther. [Hon. Members: “King.”] Martin Luther King—even more puzzling. Martin Luther was of course responsible for the great saying, “Who loves not wine, women and song remains a fool his whole life long,” but I do not think that that was the object of my hon. Friend’s attempt to introduce him into the debate. However, my hon. Friend’s fundamental point—that we are looking for an early gesture from the Government to reassure our constituents that they do not just have warm sounds, but an initial step towards resolving the funding problem—is absolutely right, and one that I think all hon. Members endorse.

There are budgetary challenges to finding a solution, but the F40 group has submitted various suggestions for interim funding proposals that would improve the situation considerably. It has put forward four options to make steps towards equality, not all of which are hugely expensive. It is not for me to ask for a specific amount of money or a specific formula for the Government to start the ball rolling, but I urge the Government to look closely at the F40 group’s proposals in the hope that one of them is attractive and affordable, and, above all, can be introduced for the academic year 2014-15—before the funding settlement of the next Government.

My main wish is for the Minister to take from the debate the thought that not only are the Government able to agree with the principle and the direction of travel, but they can make the first steps to implement financial change to show that this long, 20-year inequality will finally be tackled.

[Mark Garnier (Wyre Forest) (Con)]

My hon. Friend has mentioned timing on three occasions. Is that not one of the crucial points? Given that we have had that inequality for 20 years and that we have a very strained economic environment, it is vital that we resolve this problem as soon as possible and in the best way possible.

[Richard Graham]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Of course, the difficulty is in the words, “as soon as possible” and “the best way possible”. Neither he nor I have control of the finances, but I think we both agree strongly that this is our opportunity to lobby the Minister and for him to reflect the strength of our conviction to the Treasury in the hope that additional moneys can be found as soon as possible.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Walker]

Absolutely, I could not agree with my hon. Friend more. That injustice would be made all the more clear if there were greater transparency on school-by-school funding.

There have also been some moves to protect special needs funding and to simplify arrangements for early years provision, all of which we welcome. The Government set out plans to end disparities within local authority areas but, with a perhaps understandable concern to limit turbulence, they have so far resisted dealing with disparities between authorities until 2015. There is much to praise, therefore, but that last point is a profound mistake.

The biggest and most obvious flaws in the current funding system, as my hon. Friends have pointed out, are the yawning gaps left in per pupil funding between neighbouring authorities. There is a gap of £1,088 between annual per pupil funding in Worcestershire and neighbouring Birmingham; my hon. Friend the Member for Loughborough (Nicky Morgan) mentioned the gap of almost £900 between Leicester and Leicestershire, the lowest funded authority; and there is the stunning gap of nearly £5,000 between the lowest and the highest authorities. We have often discussed such disparities before, and I accept that there are many historic and political reasons for them, but the Minister has accepted the point that no firm formula underpins them any longer. The successive layers of government priorities that created those gaps have ossified over the years, and the gaps have grown ever wider as spending has grown, creating an unfair and indeed unjustifiable system.

It is extremely welcome that the Government have recognised the problem, and the previous Government suggested that they were beginning to do so, but it is not enough to recognise a problem—the challenge is to correct it. When the previous Labour Government opened a consultation on funding reform but proposed no preventive action, I and many others present would have accused them of dithering. Now that my own coalition Government, whose education reforms I support strongly and whose pupil premium I have praised, are proposing no action until after the next spending review, I cannot do otherwise with them. To accept the need for fundamental reform but to postpone any move towards it is similar to a dentist recognising the cause of a toothache making a patient’s life unbearable and then offering to deal with it in three years’ time. If such a case came to our surgeries as MPs, we would react with outrage. On behalf of all the teachers, head teachers, parents and—above all—pupils in our schools, we must demand swifter action now.

The question is not about a system that rewards the neediest areas and gives least to the best off. If that were the case, the City of London would hardly be the best funded authority in the country, nor Kensington and Chelsea in the top 10. Since the introduction of the pupil premium, many F40 authorities have received a good chunk of pupil premium funding, despite the factors mentioned by my hon. Friends, showing that there are significant levels of deprivation in many F40 areas. In my own urban constituency, I have wards that are among the most deprived in the entire country. However, the low level of underlying funding, before the allocation of the pupil premium, means that many head teachers in those wards tell me that they need the extra money to break even—to keep their schools afloat—and that they cannot spend the money on what it was intended for, to improve the chances of the most deprived.

[Mark Garnier]

My hon. Friend and neighbour might be interested to hear about my recent discussions with some schools in Wyre Forest. Usually, a school expects to pay somewhere between 80% and 85% of its budget on staffing. Now, because of the very low funding formula, we see typical schools in such lower funded areas spending nearer 90% or even more than 90% of the budget on staffing—an intolerable situation for their head teachers to manage.

[Mr Walker]

Absolutely right. My hon. Friend from Worcestershire points out that the extra money from the pupil premium is sometimes needed to support such costs and it is not necessarily reaching the target at which it is aimed.

We all recognise that it is impossible to correct the problem overnight. Ministers have said that their consultation threw up widespread support for reform but also much concern about turbulence. Interestingly, the teaching unions came out strongly in favour of postponing the issue; in doing so, they might have been representing many of their members, but they were certainly failing to represent the interests of those members in F40 areas whom we meet day in, day out.

The many MPs I have spoken to and the volunteers who make up the F40 executive recognise the need to avoid setting one part of the country against another in a scrap for funding. We also recognise that it is incredibly difficult to change the system radically when spending is under extreme constraint. We can idly wish that the previous Government had been quicker to act and more determined to deliver, but what is done is done; the opportunity to correct the glaring inequalities in the system during the days of ready money has now been lost forever. In the tough conditions of today, however, the need for fairer funding is all the greater. Worcestershire school leaders tell me that they understand the need for constraint and, like other public servants, they are straining every sinew to deliver more with less, but they are harder pressed to do so when there is an open and acknowledged injustice in how they are funded. In Worcestershire, we have schools within a few miles of the boundary with Birmingham that must deliver lessons on a budget hundreds of pounds per pupil lower, that must compete for teachers with a much better funded authority down the road and that are now being asked to accept the same constraints as that neighbouring authority, having missed out on many of the benefits of easier times. It would be neither fair nor reasonable to make no move in the lifetime of this Government to right such wrongs.



I am grateful that, within days of his March announcement, the Secretary of State met the Chairman of F40 and some of its local authority members to hear their concerns. Neither he nor the Minister would have been surprised at the profound disappointment they expressed at the decision to postpone until 2015 the move to a new formula. At that meeting, it was agreed that further representations would be accepted from the group on changes that would not hurt the funding of other authorities, but would mark a first step, however small, towards greater fairness. F40 has since sent in its suggestions, which I strongly support.

We have heard about Martin Luther and Martin Luther King, and I want to introduce Mark Twain to the debate. He wrote:

“The secret of getting ahead is to get started”.

F40 has suggested some options for getting started. It looked at the cost of bringing the lowest-funded authorities up to the level of Lincolnshire, which is the 41st worst-funded authority, and found that that would cost almost £300 million. It considered giving each of the lowest-funded authorities a small flat cash bonus to help, but found that the difference would be too small, and the process would simply rearrange the league table, pushing some authorities outside the F40 down the tables. Under its preferred option, it has proposed making the shift towards Lincolnshire levels of funding, but doing so proportionately, taking each of the lowest 40 one third of the way towards that level. That modest suggestion has the advantage of giving most help to those who need it most, while not altering the fundamental balance of funding.

F40 has suggested that Ministers should seek the £99 million cost directly from the Treasury. I think all hon. Members here would support the Department for Education in applying for that. However, knowing the harsh constraints on public spending that are Labour’s unfortunate legacy, will the Minister consider whether any of it can be found from other sources within the education budget? The sum of £99 million is less than the set- up costs of the new Education Funding Agency, and a very small amount relative to the £1.25 billion earmarked for the pupil premium next year, or the £2.5 billion that it is set to reach by 2015. It could make a major contribution to the work of that vital premium, ensuring it had its intended effect in the areas that it currently has difficulty reaching.

The sum of £99 million is a tiny amount compared with the £36.5 billion paid out under the dedicated schools grant to local authorities and schools around England. If that £99 million were taken equally from all those authorities better funded than Lincolnshire, it would equate to just 0.4% of their DSG funding, and cost no single authority more than £4 million. I hasten to add that that is not what F40 nor I propose, because we prefer no authorities to lose out in the quest for fairer funding, but such a change would be a small step towards a fairer system at a cost that would enable them to stay well within their minimum funding guarantee that no school lose more than 1.5%. At the end of the day, it is up to Ministers to decide the best way of meeting the challenge. We are here today to urge them to do so.

I shall illustrate how the problem has developed. During the first year of the Labour Government, when my predecessor in Worcester used his maiden speech to promise fairer funding as a result of the abolition of assisted places, the gap between Worcestershire and the national average stood at £230 per pupil, and was £380 between us and our neighbours in Birmingham. By the end of that Labour Government, the gap with the national average had risen to £371 per pupil, and with Birmingham it had doubled to £760.

The coalition agreement focused on fairness, but it is disappointing to record that under the coalition Government the unfair gap has widened further. In the current financial year, it stands at £482 per pupil against the national average, and £1,088 against Birmingham, almost three times the gap in 1997. For too long the system has been working against us. For too long we have faced an ever-widening gap. The Government have been brave to recognise the flaws in the system, and right to recognise the need for fundamental reform. However, as Benjamin Franklin said:

“Well done is better than well said."

Today, we are asking for a down payment on reform, a firm signal that the changes that we all agree are needed will be delivered, and a first step towards delivering them. The last Government failed completely to deliver on the issue. The present Government not only can, but must deliver. I urge the Minister to respond positively to the urgent representations from F40 to set much-needed change in motion, and to deliver a real improvement to schools in Worcestershire and across all the areas that have hitherto been left behind. We must not just talk the talk on fairer funding; we must walk the walk. As Shakespeare said: “Action is eloquence”. The Government have displayed great eloquence in dealing with the issue. Now is the time for action.

[Karen Lumley (Redditch) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure, Mr Gray, to serve under your chairmanship. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Gloucester (Richard Graham) on securing this important debate. It is not the first we have had in Westminster Hall on this matter. We have had a debate on Worcestershire, and the Minister is well aware of my views, so I will not speak at length.

A good education is the right of every child in this country. I was educated in the state system, as were both my children. Every child deserves the best education we can provide, and the state should provide it. Imagine my shock when I moved to Redditch 12 years ago to find that my children were in a postcode lottery for education funding. We had arrived from Wales where funding per head was far more than in Redditch. I have campaigned for those 12 years to rectify the situation, and I thought that when we finally got the Conservative-led coalition we would see the end of that disgraceful situation. I am disappointed that again the children of Redditch will have to wait at least three years before they get a fair deal.

Will the Minister explain directly to all the children, teachers and parents in Redditch just why they are worth less than those who live 7 miles up the road in Birmingham? As my hon. Friend the Member for Gloucester (Richard Graham) said, funding per child in Redditch is £1,000 less than in Birmingham.

[Mark Garnier]

In neighbouring Wyre Forest I share the same problem as my hon. Friend. Does she accept that it is a tribute to the teachers in our constituencies of Redditch and Wyre Forest in Worcestershire that they choose to work in those financially constrained conditions when they could take the easy option and move 8 miles up the road to Birmingham where they would received 45% more money? They choose to look after our students and pupils, and we should pay tribute to them for that.

[Karen Lumley]

I certainly pay tribute to those teachers, and I will come to that. I used to be chair of the governors of a first school in Redditch, and if it had received the same funding as Birmingham, it would have had £400,000 more. One of my first jobs then was to appoint a new head at Vaynor first school. She came from a school in Birmingham, and was shocked at the funding level. She did not stay long.

I know that fairer funding is on the agenda, and I am grateful for that. I acknowledge that we have inherited the worst deficit from the previous Government, but that should motivate the present Government to address the structural deficiencies in the system now, and not continue to the next Parliament with an unjust system that jeopardises the future of young people in Redditch. I look forward very much to hearing the Minister’s response.