School Funding

Rushanara Ali Excerpts

Thursday 25th April 2019 Commons Chamber

[Rushanara Ali (Bethnal Green and Bow) (Lab)]

I am grateful to the hon. Member for St Albans (Mrs Main) and the other co-sponsors for securing this important debate on school funding. There are few subjects more important to this House than the future of the nation’s children. They will be the inheritors of a post-Brexit Britain. They will be digital natives, as unfazed by digital technology as we are by electricity. We will bequeath to them the big challenges facing the country and the world, such as climate change, new kinds of labour market, and many more. That is why it is so important to invest in our young people’s talents and ensure that they are among the best educated in the world.

Let me start with the ugly truth: this Government are letting the next generation down. Ministers are failing to make the necessary investment, and the Government are endangering our prosperity and productivity by not investing in education and skills.

[Susan Elan Jones (Clwyd South) (Lab)]

I am conscious of the differences between the English and Welsh systems, but given the concerns of teachers, parents and students, does my hon. Friend agree that we need to be spending a higher percentage of our GDP on education?

[Rushanara Ali]

I absolutely agree. We need cross-party agreement to ensure that we invest in our children’s futures, because that will ensure our nation’s prosperity.

School funding has been cut in successive Budgets since 2010, and that has continued into this Parliament, as the hon. Member for St Albans mentioned. Since just 2015, when the previous Prime Minister won his short-lived majority, nine out of 10 schools have seen real-terms cuts in per-pupil spending. If Ministers had maintained spending even at 2015 levels, overall school funding would be £5.1 billion higher than it is. Across the board, from early years to further education, funding cuts are devastating our young constituents’ lives when they should be supported.

The Education Policy Institute found that the proportion of local authority secondary schools in deficit has trebled to more than a quarter of all such schools. My constituency has the highest child poverty rate in the country, with an 11 percentage point increase since 2015, but its schools and colleges face drastic cuts. An enlightened Department for Education would put resources into the schools that need them, not take them away. Schools in my constituency face a £16 million funding cut between 2015 and 2020, which is an assault on aspiration.

Education in my constituency was transformed over the previous decade, thanks to investment and Government support, but taking all that away damages lives and makes matters worse. The same can be said for many constituencies across the House. It is so important to reverse the cuts and to reverse the increase in class sizes, because the same things are happening elsewhere, including in pockets of poverty in leafy suburbs—I recognise the points made by Conservative Members—but we must not punish poor areas such as my constituency by taking resources away. We must level up, not start a race to the bottom. We need to avoid a divisive approach that pits MPs against each other for much-needed resources for their schools, which has been the tendency over recent years following the assault on the fair funding formula and cuts more generally. We have fewer teaching assistants. Teachers are leaving education. There are massive problems with infrastructure and lack of investment. Just like the NHS, we need a new consensus to ensure investment and to protect young people’s futures by ensuring that they can pursue meaningful careers and make a positive contribution to our society.

In the 2018 Budget, the Chancellor said that he would provide £400 million of extra cash, but the reality is that we need billions. He told the Treasury Committee yesterday that the comprehensive spending review could be delayed due to the lack of clarity around Brexit, yet the Government have spent over £4 billion preparing for a no-deal Brexit. We need to prioritise the comprehensive spending review, and if it does not come soon, the Government must step in and ensure that schools get the much-needed funding they require.

We need pupils to be taught in decent-sized, safe classrooms with good, modern equipment and with motivated teachers, tailored education for all and a range of cultural enrichments. We need to make sure pupils realise their full potential. We need to make sure the education system not only tackles social exclusion and discrimination but ensures that all children thrive so that we have the world-class economy we need to face future challenges. We need our education system to provide the future engineers, scientists, entrepreneurs, artists and writers, and we need it to be the best in the world. That is what is lacking, because this Government lack the aspiration and the courage to invest in our future by investing in future generations of young people. I call on the Minister to take urgent action to invest in our schools to reverse the negative impacts and support our kids.