Small and Village School Funding

Robert Courts Excerpts

Wednesday 17th July 2019 Westminster Hall

[Robert Courts (Witney) (Con)]

It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Sir David. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Harborough (Neil O’Brien) on securing this critical debate, and I join all hon. Members in their praise for small schools, village schools and rural schools. My constituency has a great many: about 70% of Witney’s schools are village schools or rural schools, and 90% of them are rated “good” or “outstanding”. That is a tribute to the outstanding work to all the teachers who have worked so hard to make the quality of education so high. I declare an interest: my wife is a governor at one of those schools—Bladon Church of England Primary School, the village primary school where I live.

As hon. Members have said, we cannot overestimate the importance of a village school. It is the centre of the community—the beating heart, as my hon. Friend the Member for Chichester (Gillian Keegan) said. It might have been where our parents, our grandparents or we ourselves went to school, and it may be where our children go. It is a crucial way to build links with the local community. What makes such schools so special? As has been said many times, their nurturing and caring nature and the amount of attention that individual schools can give results from their relatively small size. However, that is also one of their great challenges.

I have been to the majority of schools in my constituency and spoken to teachers, parents and governors. I have visited assemblies, seen the projects that pupils take part in and attended the school fêtes that often happen during the summer. I have had conversations and really tried to understand the issues in detail. As I am sure the Minister and many hon. Friends will understand, school funding is a complicated issue that repays detailed study—I have certainly tried to study it. Having had all those conversations with teachers, because I very much value that close relationship, I think I can make some suggestions.

West Oxfordshire is an f40 area—a rural area that historically has been underfunded. I do not think that it is terribly helpful to make any cheap political points about cuts; the Minister will tell us that there have not been cuts, because core per-pupil school funding has been protected for the duration of the spending review. However, I make it absolutely clear that my primary schools—my small schools, rural schools and village schools—face significant cost pressures.

There are a number of reasons for those pressures, which I hope the Minister can help with. Some of them may be a result of funding very well-deserved teacher pay rises. Pension costs were another major concern, although I understand that they are now covered. Several hon. Members have mentioned special educational needs provision, which is critical and of increasing concern for our small schools. There has also been a reduction in the spending powers of local authorities; many things that were once covered are no longer free, and schools are expected to pick up the cost. It may not be direct, but the net effect is the same: our excellent schools are trying to do much more, to less effect. In some cases, that may be due to pupil numbers, which are critical because all these schools are functioning on the tightest of budgets. From speaking to the teachers, I am clear that they are making every penny count, certainly in my constituency in west Oxfordshire, but the funding is on a per-pupil basis. That can be a problem, because if the catchment area is relatively small—if it is a village, a rural area or perhaps even a small town—a fluctuation in pupil numbers can cause real concern.

I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for St Ives (Derek Thomas), who mentioned military forces. A quarter of the entire Royal Air Force is in west Oxfordshire, based in Carterton and the whole area around RAF Brize Norton. It is certainly a concern, not just for village schools but for Carterton primary schools, that those personnel are posted, so the schools do not necessarily know from one year to another how many pupils they are likely to have at a particular stage. That causes significant budgeting challenges. Even for the best-run school in the world, not knowing how many pupils it will have makes things harder. In some areas in my villages, there may be a low birth rate, an ageing population, or families moving in and out because they are in the armed forces or for other reasons. That has had a major effect in several villages in my area.

The effect of multi-academy trusts has been very helpful in many cases. The Oxford Diocesan Schools Trust is shared by my constituency and the Prime Minister’s, as she was kind enough to recognise at Prime Minister’s questions last week. The trust has 12 schools in my constituency—small schools such as Bampton Primary, Leafield Primary and Wootton-by-Woodstock Primary. They are doing a fantastic job of providing outstanding education, but all such organisations, whether they are small schools on their own, local authority-run or part of a multi-academy trust, face uncertainty about pupil numbers.

If we are looking for ways to support small schools, one idea that has not yet been suggested is a dedicated funding stream for small schools—let us call it a small schools grant or a small schools loan—whereby schools can bid for funding if they have low pupil numbers or other temporary budget pressures. If a school usually has stable numbers but it has a year in which there is a dip, that will cause it great problems, but if it could apply for assistance from the Government or the local authority by way of a dedicated funding stream, that would be of great assistance, because it would give that school the certainty it needs for that year, which may help it to deal with factors such as a low local birth rate. Of course, it will also deal with money in the long run, because the local authority will not have to worry about things such as schools closing and having to relocate children or support them in that time. The cost to the community of school closures is, as other hon. Members have said, absolutely devastating and must be avoided at all costs.

I am very grateful to the Minister for coming to Westminster Hall to respond to this debate. We are all passionate about our local schools and my suggestion about a dedicated fund is just one that might assist them. I also echo the call made by my hon. Friend the Member for St Ives when he said that we must ensure the funding is in place. Of course I make the plea for more school spending in the spending review, although I appreciate and understand that that is a plea that I should direct at the Treasury and not at the Minister, but we must ensure that it goes to the right place. Our small schools—rural and village schools—provide outstanding education and we must provide the funding they need; I look forward to seeing that funding in due course.