School Funding

Thérèse Coffey Excerpts

Tuesday 24th April 2012 Westminster Hall

[Andrew Selous]

I thank my hon. Friend for speaking with passion and for further illustrating the point, which all hon. Members are making.

Some hon. Members have already mentioned that relatively wealthy areas often have significant pockets of deprivation. That is true in my constituency. There is deprivation in Houghton Regis, for example. The indices of multiple deprivation in some wards in that town are not dissimilar to those in much higher-funded Luton next door. The formula fails poorer children in wealthier areas. We need to look at that to see whether the formula could drill down and give additional funding for poorer children in slightly wealthier areas.

[Dr Thérèse Coffey (Suffolk Coastal) (Con)]

I am sure that my hon. Friend will agree that the pupil premium has been a great advance for poorer children, but in many counties there is quite a low level of unemployment and poorer constituents often do not qualify for free school meals and miss out, and are not being helped by the differential funding that he rightly condemns.

[Andrew Selous]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for adding that important point to the debate.

This Government made an impressive start on this issue by publishing “School funding reform: next steps towards a fairer system” a few weeks ago. I am grateful to the Minister and his colleagues at the Department for recognising the problem and setting out a route map for dealing with this issue. Having looked through the document, I understand that it will look to vary funding between different areas to try to deal with some of the discrepancies by up to 1.5% variance from the minimum funding guarantee per year. That will apply in both 2013-14 and 2014-15. That is an important start for which we are all grateful.

It is worth putting on the record that this Government came into office inheriting a complete economic shambles. We are still having to borrow £120 billion just to pay for public expenditure this year and we are honouring our commitments on increasing funding to the NHS and on international development. Notwithstanding that, Ministers in the Department have maintained cash budgets for schools, which is no mean achievement. That should go on the record in this debate. Many hon. Members know that the only way to deal with this issue, and the unfairness that many of us are rightly raising, is to get the economy growing and get real economic growth. In a time of rising budgets, I believe that by doing so we will be able to make significant progress towards dealing with these inequalities. I should welcome some reassurance from the Minister that that will happen as the economy grows.