School Funding

Wera Hobhouse Excerpts

Thursday 25th April 2019 Commons Chamber

[Wera Hobhouse (Bath) (LD)]

The Government keep telling us that more money than ever before is going to schools, but they ignore the reality on the ground. Today I want to unpick one number that they have used to justify their position, because it simply does not stand up to scrutiny. Shortly after the 2017 general election the Government announced an extra £1.3 billion. According to Survation, a full three quarters of a million people changed the party they voted for in 2017 because of the school funding emergency. The Government had to respond, but they misheard us—we said “More money,” not “Move money.”

That £1.3 billion was not new money. Some £315 million was taken out of a fund for new PE facilities, and the Government passed the bill for 30 new schools on to cash-strapped local authorities. The Government raided the new money from the capital budget while the National Audit Office estimates that it will cost £6.7 billion just to return all school buildings to a satisfactory condition. Newbridge Primary School in Bath has fallen foul of that raid. Children are being taught in buildings with leaky roofs, and they play on playing fields surrounded by crumbling walls. At a meeting I secured with a Minister, the school was told to look for a cheaper ground maintenance contractor.

Meanwhile, the so-called new money did nothing to reverse the real-terms cuts to per-pupil funding between 2015 and 2017. Today, 91% of schools have less money per pupil in real terms than they did in 2015. In my constituency, schools have seen their per-pupil funding cut by £213 in real terms since 2015.

The reason this angers me so much is that our schools funding emergency is a political choice. The latest estimate from the National Education Union is that it would cost about £2.2 billion to bring the main three blocks of the national funding formula back up to 2015 levels. Instead, the Government have spent more than half that money on increasing the higher rate threshold for income tax, so that people like us here in Parliament get a tax cut of more than £500 per year, even though we Lib Dems voted against the tax cuts for ourselves. This just goes to show the very wrong choices that this Government are making. The Liberal Democrats committed to reversing school cuts at the last general election and we will do so again at the next one, but the longer the Government wait, the more teachers and parents will vote with their feet and they will probably do so in the local elections on 2 May.

I want to make one special plea today, and it is one that has been echoed across the Chamber. The Government must provide an immediate funding boost for pupils with special educational needs. They are on the front- line of our schools funding emergency. The high-needs budget is not keeping up with the rise in SEND pupil numbers. In Bath and North East Somerset, the high-needs budget is worth about £21,000 for each child with an education, health and care plan, but that is £1,600 less in real terms than in 2015. We are more than £1.8 million short of what we need just to tread water, and this is for children with the most complex special needs. Support for those who do not meet the threshold for an EHCP must be paid out of the squeezed local authority schools budget.

The Minister must consider providing additional money in the national funding formula to cover some of the costs that schools are currently paying—usually £6,000—as their contribution towards an education, health and care plan. That way, we could free up schools’ budgets to provide in-school support for children with additional needs who do not usually qualify for an EHCP, such as pupils with dyslexia or high-functioning autism. I urge the Government to end this funding emergency, so that schools and colleges, and particularly pupils with SEND, can have the money that they so desperately need and deserve.