Schools: National Funding Formula

Robert Halfon Excerpts

Thursday 14th September 2017 Commons Chamber

[Justine Greening]

I want to start by adding a massive thank you to the Department for Education officials who have worked on this for many years. It has been a complex piece of work, and it has been looked at under many Governments. I want to put on record my thanks to the team.

On the points raised by the hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Angela Rayner), I had hoped, given the cross-party recognition of the need for school funding reform, that there might be a warmer welcome for this announcement. It is not just schools represented by Government Members that will gain from it; many in Opposition Members’ constituencies have been equally underfunded. This is not a political issue; it is a question of ensuring that we fund children, wherever they are growing up in our country, in a consistent, transparent and fair fashion. That is what we are shifting towards today. This is not an uncomplicated thing, and we have worked really hard to make sure that schools that were already well funded will continue to remain well funded. However, this is also about making sure that schools that have traditionally been underfunded for a very long time can now start to catch up.

The hon. Lady asked a few questions. I think she misunderstood my point about ensuring that there is a minimum per pupil funding rate of £4,800 for secondary schools and £3,500 for primary schools. There are not many schools that are not at that minimum funding rate, but it is important for those that are below it that we address those issues through the consultation response. That is what we are doing today—[Interruption.] The hon. Lady asks what the guidance says. That guidance is for local authorities, as I have explained and as I hope she will understand. Local authorities currently set local formulae. We had already said, and I had hoped she might have recalled, that that will continue for 2018-19. When I came back to the House in July this year, I set out that that would also continue for 2019-20 because we believe that the right way to bring in a significant change in school funding is to work with local authorities. As part of the setting out of the final funding formula, we also set out a small but important element of flexibility for local authorities to respond to the changes as they come through and to nuance them to take account of local issues. That is where the optional element comes in. We are simply saying that it is right to give local authorities a modicum of flexibility to ensure that they can use the funding effectively on the ground.

We are being clear-cut about what the funding formula allocates to every single school in this country, and Members will be able to see those allocations. They will be able to sit down with their local authorities, and if they want the funding to go to those schools they will be able to ensure that it does. I expect that some local authorities will feel that the right thing to do is to get on with putting the funding formula in place at local level and that they will simply pass the money straight through to the schools. That is something that I would support, but it is important to have a small amount of flexibility while the formula comes in.

The hon. Lady asked about the fact that we are putting an extra £1.3 billion of additional funding into the core schools formula and budget. I felt it was important to do this. Over the past few years, we have challenged schools to try to find efficiencies, because we want to get the most out of every pound we put in. However, it is also important that I challenge the rest of my Department to do the same kind of exercise that we are asking schools and headteachers to do. I believe that doing that has enabled us to free up some additional resourcing that we can now push directly to headteachers in the frontline. Frankly, I am staggered that the hon. Lady thinks that that is a bad thing to do. Anyone in my role should be challenging their civil servants to try to work smarter and more efficiently to get money directly through to the frontline. That is yet another example of the hon. Lady doing nothing other rant and produce rhetoric, and there is not a lot of thought behind that rhetoric about what is the right thing to do.

With that, I will sit down. I look forward to the contributions from hon. Members.

[Robert Halfon (Harlow) (Con)]

I strongly welcome this announcement, particularly the help for the disadvantaged. This is social justice in action, and I look forward to discussing the measures with my right hon. Friend when she comes to the Education Committee on 25 October. Has an assessment been made of how much the pupil premium helps disadvantaged pupils in particular? How will the pupil premium sit alongside the national funding formula?

[Justine Greening]

We have been clear about protecting the funding that is going to the children we want to be able to catch up. Both the Education Endowment Foundation and Ofsted have done important, insightful work on the use of the pupil premium. It is important that we get the most out of that investment, and I think we are steadily understanding what works to help children who are falling behind to catch up. The transparency in the new formula means that we can now take a similar approach on helping children catch up with the other money flowing through the core schools formula. In time, we can have a common strategy across the two budget elements. One of the most important things that we did in education in the previous Parliament, other than our general push to raise standards, was to identify that we needed to put funding against children who are at risk of falling behind, because that is how we will drive social mobility through education.