School Funding

Seema Malhotra Excerpts

Wednesday 25th January 2017 Commons Chamber

[Angela Rayner]

I hope that the hon. Members I mentioned will make contributions today, because the motion before the House makes it clear that our schools are facing a cocktail of cuts that will see 98% of schools lose out in the funding formula. I hope that the Government think again about their proposals.

[Seema Malhotra (Feltham and Heston) (Lab/Co-op)]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful speech. In my constituency we are looking at cuts of £437 per pupil between 2015 and 2019. With the Government saying that they believe in and want to support social mobility, and with a third of our children across the country not achieving even five good GCSEs, does she agree that this is absolutely the wrong time to be cutting school funding for the pupils who most need it and that it is an own goal when it comes to thinking about our future shared prosperity?

[Angela Rayner]

I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend, and I would go so far as to say that the meritocracy that the Prime Minister talks about is already in tatters.

The National Audit Office has said that the Secretary of State expects schools to make £1.7 billion of savings by “using staff more efficiently.” Can she guarantee today that those so-called efficiencies do not mean fewer staff? A £1.7 billion cut could mean up to 10,000 redundancies for teaching staff in our schools. She has resolutely failed to give us figures on the impact of the planned cut, but her own analysis of the research conducted by the education unions shows that, for example, the cuts in my region—the north-west—would amount to well over £400 million, requiring the loss of more than 2,000 teachers. Given that the Government have failed to meet their own teacher recruitment targets for the past five years in a row, I urge her to think again before she tries to solve school budget crises on the back of hard-working staff.

Make no mistake, this is a crisis. Indeed, schools are already resorting to staff cuts in order to cope. A Unison staff survey conducted last year showed that, even then, more than one in 10 respondents were reporting redundancies in the past year and in the coming year. More than one in five said that their school had left vacant posts unfilled over the past year or had cut maintenance. Nearly a quarter had seen increased class sizes, and over a quarter had experienced cuts to budgets for books and resources over the past year.