Oral Answers to Questions

Rishi Sunak Excerpts

Monday 20th July 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Gibb]

The hon. Gentleman was not here under the previous Labour Government when they cut 200,000 primary school places in the middle of a baby boom. One of the first decisions that we had to take in 2010 was to double the amount of spending on creating more school places. Some £5 billion was spent in the previous Parliament and £7 billion will be spent in this one.

[Rishi Sunak (Richmond (Yorks)) (Con)]

9. What progress her Department is making on providing fairer funding for schools.

[Mr Laurence Robertson (Tewkesbury) (Con)]

12. What progress she has made on the introduction of a national funding formula for schools.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education (Mr Sam Gyimah)]

It is deeply unfair that we have a schools funding formula based on historic allocation rather than on actual need of schools and pupils. That is why the manifesto confirmed extra financial support for the least well-funded authorities for 2015-16, protected the schools budget in real terms and committed to making the system fairer. I can confirm that we will be putting proposals before the House for funding reform in due course.

[Rishi Sunak]

I warmly welcome my hon. Friend’s answer and hope that he can continue to make progress for the students in my constituency. Will he comment on the recent National Audit Office report that recommended a fairer formula so that pupils receive funding that is related

“more closely to their needs, and less affected by where they live”?

[Mr Gyimah]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point. It is unfair that a primary pupil eligible for free school meals in Richmond receives £472 extra funding while a similar student in another part of Yorkshire receives almost £300 more. That is why we recently announced that the schools block funding rates for 2016-17 have been baked in the extra funding that we distributed in the last financial year to make funding fairer.