Robin Walker
Main Page: Robin Walker (Conservative - Worcester)Department Debates - View all Robin Walker's debates with the Department for Education
(9 years, 8 months ago)
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Mr Robin Walker (Worcester) (Con)
I beg to move,
That this House believes that, given the continued fiscal pressure on the schools budget in the next Parliament, the speedy implementation of a fair and transparent school funding formula is more urgent than ever.
It is a pleasure to open this debate and to speak on an issue that I have raised during each year of my time in Parliament, and one that still needs addressing and never more urgently than in the run-up to a crucial general election. I hope today’s debate can inform the manifestos of all the main parties and lay down a challenge for the next Government to deliver on.
Today’s motion has cross-party support: more than 64 Back Benchers from across the House have signed it. I am very grateful to the Backbench Business Committee for recognising that it is an urgent and important enough matter to merit debate in the main Chamber. I am also very grateful to the two vice-chairs of the F40 campaign, who are both in their places: the hon. Members for North Devon (Sir Nick Harvey) and for Scunthorpe (Nic Dakin). We are here to correct a long-standing injustice, and it is a credit to Parliament that there is such a strong turnout.
We have seen some progress on this issue, but the key decisions on the shape of a new national funding formula have been delayed until after the 2015 spending review. To say that that was disappointing in a place such as Worcestershire, which has lingered at the bottom of the funding table for far too long, would be an understatement. One local head teacher, in a letter to our local paper, recently described it as “immoral” that the issue of fair funding has been unaddressed for so long.
Local MPs have repeatedly made the case for a new formula that is based more on activity and the characteristics of schools and their catchments, and less on accidents of geography. We have attended debate after debate on this issue, and not just in the current Parliament. Colleagues with experience of previous Parliaments have often regaled me with their efforts to press this issue and point out the glaring disparities that affect their schools and constituents.
Mr Ian Liddell-Grainger (Bridgwater and West Somerset) (Con)
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I have been here since 2001 and this has been a thorny problem since then. I was in the same intake as the Minister, who is in his place. I hope that when he gets the chance to speak he will address the situation in Somerset, where we face the same problem as Worcester.
Neil Parish (Tiverton and Honiton) (Con)
I thank my hon. Friend for leading this debate. In Devon, we have now seen £193 in extra funding per pupil. That is great news, but there is still a big gap to fill, especially with so many small rural schools and a sparse population. We do a very good job with very poor funding. I look to the next Parliament to do better.
Mr Speaker
Order. May I point out to colleagues that in addition to the hon. Member for Worcester and the Front Benchers, who need briefly to speak, there are on my list nine colleagues who wish to speak? The hon. Gentleman is perfectly entitled to make a full contribution, but I know he will find that helpful to weigh in the balance.
Mr Walker
I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish), who has always been a great champion for rural areas.
F40, the cross-party campaign formed more than 20 years ago to represent the lowest-funded areas, used to rail against a gap of hundreds of pounds in funding between rural areas and their urban areas, and in Worcestershire, local MPs spoke out against a gap that doubled during the 13 years of the previous Labour Government. Until the current year, it had never once narrowed. When the gap started, there was no justice in the fact that similar schools serving similar catchments with similar levels of deprivation on different sides of a random border could receive wildly different funding. As the gap has widened, so the challenge for schools to raise the attainment of all their pupils has become greater and the challenge to hold on to their best teachers bigger. Although the pupil premium has helped some schools in F40 areas, it has also added to the disparities by piling targeted funding for deprivation on top of the untargeted funding that went before.
Anne Marie Morris (Newton Abbot) (Con)
Does my hon. Friend agree that there is particular difficultly in fast-growth areas, such as Devon, where there are large distances to take children back and forth to school?
Neil Carmichael (Stroud) (Con)
I want to draw the House’s attention to Ofsted’s excellent report on the long tail of underachievement, which identifies rural and coastal areas among those parts of the country facing difficulties, as is precisely reflected in the F40 group. Is that not one of the reasons we have to tackle this problem?
Mr Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)
Yet again, my hon. Friend is leading off the debate—in 10 years in the House, I have raised this matter only eight times, so I stand behind him in that respect. Does he agree that the Government did the right thing last year by closing the gap a little but that we need all parties to commit to a new funding formula in the next Parliament, as the Conservative party has done, to ensure that we have a fair and just settlement, not just in rhetoric but in reality?
Guy Opperman (Hexham) (Con)
The other point that surely needs addressing is the pupil premium. Although we all support it as a principle and in its effects, is it not a blunt instrument, because it skews an already unfair system? Does that not need reviewing?
Mr Walker
What needs reviewing is the underlying system of school funding to create something fairer and more transparent. I believe that the pupil premium can play a role in such a system, but my hon. Friend makes a good point.
I welcome the fact that last year saw the first real step forward. The schools Minister, with help from the Chancellor, was the first person to provide funding to address the funding gap. His announcement of what started as £350 million and then grew to £390 million of extra funding to help the lowest-funded areas was a genuine step forward and the first concrete sign that real change was on its way. At the time, Members spoke of a down payment and welcomed the benefits for those who stood to gain. We queried elements of the allocation and pushed for F40 areas to receive more of it, and between the initial allocation and the second, the F40 areas did indeed receive more—so the parliamentary pressure made a difference.
This first small step will mean £6.7 million for Worcestershire schools this year—an additional £97 per pupil—which will make a real difference from April onwards, and it will mean that this year, for the first time in decades, the gap between schools on our side of the border with Birmingham and those on the other side will grow smaller rather than wider. However, cost pressures on our schools will make these victories seem minor. We will all have heard from teachers and head teachers in underfunded areas who say that costs are running ahead of their funding. I have written to Secretaries of State and Ministers countless times with local examples.
There is not time in this debate to enter into the complexities of the funding system itself—a system so devilishly complex that my hon. Friend the Member for Gloucester (Richard Graham) compared it to the Schleswig-Holstein question—but fortunately, F40 has a dedicated team of governors, teachers, heads, councillors and council officers who have worked up their own proposed changes to the funding formula. Their analytical work has been robust, and their proposals would achieve a formula based on the nature of the school and its catchment, funding a small lump sum for secondary schools and a slightly larger one for primary schools to help smaller schools; providing a proportion of funding for deprivation; and providing smaller proportions for low prior attainment, English as an additional language and sparsity—there is more work to do on sparsity.
Richard Drax (South Dorset) (Con)
On the question of sparsity, the rural schools of South Dorset are trying to form multi-academy trusts, and what is so extraordinary is that the funding is different for each pupil, depending on which local authority they come from. This is another anomaly that we must sort out.
Mr Walker
I am afraid not, I am sorry.
The F40 finance group recently met Department for Education officials and discussed these proposals. The initial feedback was very positive. It was clear that under F40 proposals there would be more gainers and fewer losers than under the current formula.
The only challenge now appears to be the political will to deliver. We are beginning to hear from all the parties what they will be offering in their manifestos. We hear that the Conservative party would protect the cash settlement for schools in per-pupil terms. The coalition is already targeting money per pupil numbers. The Labour party seeks to protect the overall schools budget and the Liberal Democrats to protect the whole of the two-to-18 education budget. The problem with any protection for budgets as a whole is that it might produce a reduction in per-pupil funding, as pupil numbers are set to grow rapidly. It has been argued that Labour’s promise of an inflationary increase in this era of low inflation could deliver lower per-pupil funding than the Conservative proposal of flat cash per pupil.
Whatever the outcome of the election, it is clear that there will be ongoing fiscal pressure on all our schools. It is perhaps understandable in that situation that Ministers are keen to avoid turbulence, but avoiding turbulence has been the main reason for not going further and faster on school funding reform in the lifetime of this Parliament. It can no longer stand. We need to make it clear that to translate any freeze in per-pupil spending overall into a freeze in the unfair formula that currently allocates it would be totally unacceptable.
We can see all too directly the pressures on schools in all of our constituencies. We know that those pressures have built up not just in a few short years of tighter budgets, but over decades of comparative underfunding. It is simply not possible in these circumstances to justify the £900 per-pupil gap between Worcestershire schools and those in neighbouring Birmingham; the £700 gap that used to exist between Leicestershire and Leicester; or the £550 gap between Devon and Bristol—still less the mind-bogglingly vast gap between the best funded and worst funded authorities. In rich London boroughs such as Kensington and Chelsea, the per-pupil funding is £5,866 and it is £6,221 in Islington, while in poorer northern towns such as Barnsley it is more than £1,700 less.
I say to Ministers and shadow Ministers that F40 has made detailed proposals for change and I hope that they can accept them. They should deliver us a fair formula and help us to close the gap between schools that have missed out for far too long and those in the best funded areas. Overall, the allocation we have put forward would be more even, fairer and would target deprivation more effectively. The pressure on the education budget makes the timetable for delivering this new formula more urgent than ever. F40 members recognise that minimum funding guarantees may be needed to smooth out the introduction of a new formula, but we are not prepared to wait for ever while they are applied. We therefore call for the move to be conducted in a maximum of three years.
We have come a long way. The argument for fairer funding has been accepted on all sides. We must now be clear that its non-delivery—whether it be for political or administrative reasons—would be totally unacceptable. To entrench the progress made, I urge the Minister to ensure that the £390 million already secured for the lowest funded areas should be baselined in the education budget for 2016-17 so that the move to a new formula will start with that downpayment taken into account. I challenge all parties to address that challenge and to deliver the fair and transparent formula that our constituents deserve.