School and College Funding: The Midlands

Debate between Toby Perkins and Zarah Sultana

Tuesday 9th May 2023 Westminster Hall

[Zarah Sultana (Coventry South) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered school and college funding in the Midlands.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Pritchard. I am pleased to have secured this important debate and grateful to the House authorities for granting it. I welcome to Westminster schoolteachers from across the midlands who have come down to listen to the debate and to hear what the Government have to say about how they will fix the crisis in our schools and colleges. I hope their journey will not have been wasted.

Before I go on, I put on record my huge admiration for our teachers, teaching assistants, lecturers and everyone who dedicates themselves to education in our schools and colleges in the midlands and beyond. They deserve so much better than their treatment by successive Conservative Governments. I also put on record my absolute support for and solidarity with the teachers and education staff in the National Education Union as they fight for fair pay and for the future of our schools and colleges. Teachers do not take action lightly; they take it as a last resort, and only because they have been pushed to breaking point while watching their pupils be failed by Ministers. They are taking action because of their commitment to education, not in spite of it. Polling shows that the public know this too—the majority back striking teachers.

I sought this debate because I want to address a simple fact: our schools and colleges are in crisis. The reason why they are in this state is no mystery. Between 2010 and 2020, school spending per pupil in England fell by 9% in real terms, funding per student aged 16 to 18 in further education and sixth-form colleges fell by 14%, and funding per school student in sixth forms fell by a whopping 28%. The consequences are all too clear: secondary school class sizes are the highest they have been in over 40 years, and primary class sizes are the highest in Europe. At the same time as pay was cut, year on year, teachers have worked more unpaid overtime than any other profession in the UK.

The impact on students and staff is hard to overstate. Teachers who went into the profession because they love education and teaching are finding it harder and harder to go on. One teacher from the west midlands told me

“the expectations are huge…the pressure unmanageable…and the rewards diminishing in every sense.

It is becoming harder and harder to find the positive every day.”

Another told me of the vicious cycle that develops: underfunding results in bigger classes and less support for students with special needs, which leads to more pressure on teachers and more staff absence.

The demands on teachers go way beyond what we should expect. While teachers’ pay has been cut, Government underfunding means that teachers increasingly have to dip into their own pockets to buy supplies. One in five are now estimated to buy everything from books and pens to rulers and glue sticks, and nearly half even buy food, clothes and soap for poorer pupils—stepping in where the state has catastrophically failed.

All of that has a predictable result. Staff recruitment and retention is in crisis and set to get worse: a quarter of all teachers and school leaders say they are considering leaving the profession for reasons other than retirement. That is backed up by the Government’s own statistics, which show that retention rates have declined since 2011 and that fewer than 60% of teachers are still in the profession after 10 years. Recruitment is in dire straits, too. The Government are now reaching less than 60% of their own target for secondary recruitment, and for some subjects the figures are even worse—just 36% for modern foreign languages, 30% for computing and an astonishing 17% for physics. That impacts learning, with a rising proportion of lessons being taught by teachers who do not have a relevant qualification. The problem has got so bad that one Coventry teacher told me of a student who by Wednesday had 10 out of their 15 lessons taught by cover staff. Perhaps nowhere in Coventry is the crisis in staff recruitment and retention felt more severely than at Coventry College.

[Mr Toby Perkins (Chesterfield) (Lab)]

I thank my hon. Friend for securing this debate. She is making an incredibly important point about recruitment. We recently saw the Prime Minister out with his strategy for getting more maths taught, but the Government are already failing to hit their own targets for maths teachers. Does it not say everything about this Government that we have, on the one hand, a big announcement about what is going to happen in schools and, on the other, abject failure to recruit maths teachers?

[Zarah Sultana]

I completely agree. It is a slogan without substance, and the Government have had to accept that those targets will not be met.

Coventry College recently announced that it would cease offering apprenticeship provision from August, citing the extreme difficulty in recruiting and retaining teaching staff. This will have a severe impact on young people in the city, depriving them of opportunities, and it runs contrary to the Government’s own skills mission as set out in the levelling-up policy agenda.

Again, there is no mystery about what is happening with recruitment and retention: educators are voting with their feet after working harder and harder for less and less. Alongside rising workloads, teachers have seen their pay cut year after year—by around 13% in real terms since 2010. The Government’s pay offer would only make things worse. In September, they offered a “pay rise” of 5%, when inflation was, of course, running at 12.6%—that so-called pay rise was really a 7% pay cut. The Government’s latest offer of an additional one-off cash payment of £1,000 would not even be consolidated into pay next year, and is dwarfed by the average energy bill alone. What makes it even worse is that, according to NEU calculations, these proposals are not even fully funded; instead, they would require most schools to make further cuts to pay for them.

It is therefore little wonder that the latest pay offer was rejected by a staggering 98% of voting NEU members. This decisive rejection must surely make the Government come back to the negotiating table with an above-inflation pay rise. That would only start to undo the damage of a decade of falling pay, as the Government must also restore pay for further education teachers and help to address the severe challenges faced by colleges across the country, including Coventry College.

It is not just staff recruitment and retention that have been impacted by Government underfunding. Just last month, a Conservative Member secured a debate in this very Chamber to highlight that inadequate school funding had resulted in a severe decline in the quality and quantity of free school meals, impacting children’s health and education. The Member cited a school in his constituency that pays £2.80 a meal, but receives just £2.41 a meal in funding. I am an active campaigner for free school meals to be extended to all children, guaranteeing every child a hot, healthy meal each day. However, those meals must be just that—healthy and nutritious—and that requires funding. Just like funding our schools and colleges more broadly, this is an investment from which we all benefit, with studies showing that healthy free school meals improve children’s learning and health, helping with concentration and behaviour.

Just as the meals that children eat at school are affected by underfunding, so too are the buildings in which they are supposed to learn. The latest annual report published by the Department for Education says:

“There is a risk of collapse of one or more blocks in some schools”,

with the Department escalating the risk of incident from “critical—likely” to “critical—very likely”. Again, there is no mystery as to why this is happening. The House of Commons Library calculates that, between 2010 and 2022, overall capital spending in schools declined by half in real terms. There have been reports of minor collapses in recent years, but it surely should not take a more serious incident, injuring staff and children—or worse—before action is finally taken.

Staff, students, parents and the public deserve so much better than crumbling school buildings and paltry school lunches. They deserve so much better than their dedicated teachers working overtime but barely making ends meet. They deserve better than record class sizes and dwindling opportunities. That means having a Government who show they care about education by putting their money where their mouth is and investing in the future of our young people and the professionals who dedicate themselves to their education. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s plans on how to address those fundamental challenges.