Schools Funding

Thérèse Coffey Excerpts

Tuesday 29th April 2014 Westminster Hall

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

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Worcester (Mr Walker) on continuing to lead the campaign and securing today’s debate. He has already made an eloquent contribution, and the point about salary increase and increase in pension contribution, or superannuation, has been well made.

I am here to fly the flag for Suffolk, as many other hon. Members have flown the flag for their own constituencies. I am sure that the Minister will do the same for Norfolk in her contribution. I welcome the extra money that we have received, but I echo and endorse the points made by many hon. Members about the real disparity that continues to be a feature of education funding. I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud (Neil Carmichael) that more money is not necessarily the only way to make improvements in educational attainment, but I am sure that it will help and I hope that the increase of £105, or 2.5%, will go some way to address the situation in Suffolk.

As has been mentioned, Suffolk is a rurally sparse county that struggles with attainment. The county council, working with the Royal Society of Arts and the schools themselves, have embarked on something called “Raising the Bar.” It is a strategy to raise attainment that will take some time, but there will hopefully be some good results quickly en route. We have paired up with Hackney, a great council that has seen significant improvement in educational attainment. I have some sympathy with my head teachers when they point out that we will be moving to funding of £5,251 on average per pupil, but Hackney currently receives £9,268, which is an additional £4,017 or 76% per child. There is a lot more money to provide additional teachers and facilities to tackle some of the issues that Hackney deals with well, including through some of the specialist units that have been developed to help with difficult children. There is a huge difference.

I want to make a point about the pupil premium, of which the coalition is rightly proud. I point out to the Minister and hon. Members present that my part of Suffolk has a low unemployment rate of less than 2%. People who do not have a job are rare—there are about 800 in total—but that does not mean that average or median wages are particularly high. In fact, they are lower than in Liverpool, where I attended school. In Liverpool Wavertree, the median wage is £510; in Suffolk Coastal it is £490; and in Ipswich, it is £460. The pupil premium is adding to a significant funding gap between different parts of the country.

[Kate Green]

Although the Government have made a welcome commitment to extend free school meals to all children at key stage 1, does the hon. Lady share my concern that, because parents will presumably no longer have to apply for free school meals, it might become more difficult to identify all the students who should attract the pupil premium? That might further exacerbate their position.

[Dr Coffey]

Some local authorities already do that. I think it is for the Government and the Department to learn from where it already happens successfully, so I am not going to go down that route. I will explain my point by making another comparison with Hackney. About half of the children there are eligible for the pupil premium, and at £1,300 for a primary pupil and £935 for a secondary pupil, that is very welcome. However, that is almost double the budget available to head teachers in Suffolk.

The extra funding that has been announced is a welcome step, but it is only a sticking plaster, and we recognise that. It is going to take quite a lot of bravery to get to the point where there is not such a disparity of thousands of pounds per pupil that turns into hundreds of thousands of pounds in our large secondary schools. We must get to grips with that. I encourage my hon. Friend the Member for Worcester to keep the campaign going, and I am sure that all Members will be working on our education Ministers and shadow Ministers in order to ensure that appropriate provision is made in the manifestos for the 2015 election.