School Funding

Thangam Debbonaire Excerpts

Thursday 25th April 2019 Commons Chamber

[Thangam Debbonaire (Bristol West) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton). I declare an interest: I come from a family of teachers, including a niece, who is still teaching.

As far as I know, no politician ever got elected saying, “I want to spend less money on schools,” but that is what we got. I am sure the Minister will tell us that the Government are spending more than ever on education, and of course that is true in cash terms, but as well as being able to add up, my constituents can do long division and they can observe what is happening in schools.

The Minister may wish to disagree with my arithmetic, or that of headteachers in Bristol, but I wonder whether he will accept that the chair of the UK Statistics Authority and the Institute for Fiscal Studies can do their numbers. Sir David Norgrove, chair of the UK Statistics Authority, said last October in a letter to the Secretary of State, in response to a blog by the Department for Education about education funding, that

“figures were presented in such a way as to misrepresent changes in school funding…school spending figures were exaggerated by using a truncated axis, and by not adjusting for per pupil spend.”

Those are not my words; they are the words of the chair of the UK Statistics Authority. He also noted that the Department

“included a wide range of education expenditure unrelated to publicly funded schools”.

In his response, the Secretary of State said that his Department was looking into the issues and admitted that “pupil numbers are rising” and that

“we are asking schools to do more and schools are facing cost pressures”,

but that is precisely my point.

I have made the point several times in this place, including to the Prime Minister, that if we increase cash funding but costs and pupil numbers rise as well, we will quickly get, in effect, a real-terms cut, and that is where we are. National insurance, teacher pay and pensions, the apprenticeship levy, rising pupil numbers, rising levels of special needs—these are all increased costs. However, as other services are cut, such as mental health support and youth work, schools are forced to try to step into the breach, but again without the money. They are being held responsible for just about every other social problem, so more pressures on and more cuts to other local services lead to more yet costs to schools—a real-terms cut.

In my constituency, Redland Green School has said that special educational needs

“are getting greater but are not being matched with funding”.

The school also told me that it cannot refer students to childhood mental health services unless they have seen a school counsellor, but there is no funding for the school counsellor. The Institute for Fiscal Studies found last year that total spending per pupil fell by about 8% or about £500 per pupil between 2009-10 and 2017-18. The effects of those cuts—and yes, they are cuts—is that schools have been forced to cut to the bone and beyond. Schools in Bristol West have told me about cuts to support staff, cuts to learning support staff, increases in class sizes and cuts to the curriculum. They have told me that they have had to cut languages and creative subjects, as well as politics, which frankly I deeply deprecate. I do not think they should have to.

St Bonaventure’s School has told me of fears of its reading recovery scheme being cut, and St John’s Primary School has had to cut a successful maths intervention. There is no money to fund professional development and training, and replacing teaching staff now routinely involves sacrificing quality for lower pay offers. It is not that the teachers are not good; they just are not as experienced, and that is not good enough. Parents, children, teachers and other school staff in Bristol West tell me that schools are being forced to do very much more with very much less money, and that is not okay.

When this Government cut education, they limit life chances. When they fail to care for children’s mental health, they build up problems for the future. And when they hold schools responsible for just about everything and fund them only to the bare minimum or less, we all lose out. Among the pupils at St Bonaventure’s, St John’s, Cotham and all the other schools in my constituency, there might be one who is going to invent a cost-effective way of making tidal power work and fuel us all for the future so that we can give up fossil fuels, or a cure for cancer. In fact, I discovered recently that, thanks to an outstanding science project, some pupils at Cotham School are working on exactly that.

Compounding all that is this Government’s utter shamelessness. As the chair of the UK Statistics Authority and the Institute for Fiscal Studies have said, school funding is being cut, and this Government will not admit it. I said earlier that no politician got elected saying that they were going to spend less, but that is what is happening. This country needs a different Government. It needs a Labour Government who will put the education, care and mental health of children and young people at the top of their list, along with tackling climate change. For the children of Bristol West, that cannot come a moment too soon.