School Funding

Victoria Atkins Excerpts

Thursday 5th November 2015 Westminster Hall

[Victoria Atkins (Louth and Horncastle) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Walker. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness (Graham Stuart) and the right hon. Member for Exeter (Mr Bradshaw) for securing this important debate.

I am privileged to represent one of the most rural and beautiful constituencies in the country, running from the Lincolnshire wolds across to the sweeping coastline of the North sea. I have had the pleasure of visiting many local schools—too many to list in the short time available—and on each visit the pupils have been engaged, dedicated and unfailingly polite yet, in money terms, they receive far less than their peers in cities. For example, they each receive £2,513 less than a pupil in Tower Hamlets. That funding gap is not just an abstract figure; it translates directly into class sizes, facilities and the range of subjects on offer, even more so when the vast distances of the country’s second-largest county are taken into account. Simply transporting children to and from school costs Lincolnshire County Council £27 million a year.

Ahead of today’s debate, I emailed all the schools in my constituency to ask school leaders for their views, and they have raised issues on both a strategic and a day-to-day level. The impact at strategic level includes the ability to attract staff to work in remote areas, particularly in the all-important leadership roles. That is made all the more difficult if rural schools do not have the budget to pay leaders as well as schools in more urban areas. One school leader emailed me to say:

“We are so restricted in our budgets that our school’s performance is now being stinted by these restrictions.”

Another wrote saying that

“every year that passes we and other schools in our setting are disadvantaged.”

Yet another wrote of the reality of rural schools in Lincolnshire: 100 schools in the county have fewer than 100 pupils because the rural sparsity of the county means that villages have very few pupils. If a village school closes, it has an enormous impact not just on pupils, parents and staff but on the villages concerned.

Teachers have also written to me about the day-to-day impact. One teacher gave the example that the cost of a swimming lesson is much higher in Lincolnshire because of the transport costs and, I suspect, because there are fewer swimming pools per hectare than in a city centre. It simply cannot be right that pupils in Lincolnshire should have to face disadvantages in everything from the leadership of their school to learning to swim because they receive less money from central Government grants than their peers in city centres.

I am conscious of the time, so I finish by paying tribute to the schools, governors and teachers in my constituency and further afield who provide, on the whole, a very good education in the circumstances, and I hope the Government repay their efforts with a fairer funding formula. I know the Minister is listening.

--- Later in debate ---

[Michael Tomlinson]

I am pleased to see the Minister nodding in agreement.

The F40 campaign group, of which I am a member, has set out an alternative formula, which I welcome. The formula would help my constituency by reducing the funding gap from £4,000 to just over £3,000. I could quote more facts and figures, as other hon. Members have done. Behind the numbers, however, are real individuals—real families, children and teachers—and those figures will make a difference in their lives and in their schools. In my constituency, the F40 proposals would see schools get an extra £240 per pupil—an increase of just under 5%, which is welcome. Schools in Poole would receive an extra £116—an increase of just under 3%, which is also welcome. However, I sound a note of caution: under the formula, schools in Poole would still be among the worst funded, although the changes would help to start narrowing the gap.

[Victoria Atkins]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the campaign is asking not for more money from the Treasury, but simply for a reallocation, so that the money that is already being spent is spent more fairly?

[Michael Tomlinson]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for making that point. It is right that the formula is about beginning to close the gap. That is all I am fighting for today.

I am pleased that the Government have recognised the issue’s importance. I am also pleased to have fought the election on a manifesto that set out so clearly the need for a fairer funding formula. Similarly, I was pleased by the responses of the Secretary of State and the Prime Minister to my questions in the House. I was pleased not just because they were in answer to my questions, but because they were encouraging.

Other hon. Members have mentioned the £390 million that was granted in 2014-15 and that is now embedded in future years. I welcome that, but I see it as a down payment—a first step—rather than the finished article.

Let me turn for a moment to wider funding issues, because the motion is that

“this House has considered funding for schools”

generally. Montacute school in my constituency is, as the Minister may know, a special academy for children with severe and multiple learning difficulties and special needs. Recently, it received a very welcome £5 million to completely restructure what was a rather dilapidated building that was falling down, and I was delighted to be present at the opening of the new building. However, the funding included no additional money for the inside—the fixtures and fittings, which are the very things that are required to make a school really a school.

Local families have clubbed together as part of Monty’s fund, and they have raised £500,000 to date. However, more is required, and I urge the Minister to consider that as a particular request. I will be making a small difference by dressing up as Father Christmas and entering the great Santa fun run with members of Wimborne rotary club. I invite the Minister to join me. Where better to run and raise money for a good cause than round Badbury Rings?