Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, with reference to the Answer of 4 December 2015 to Question 17715, on schools in West Sussex, in what year her Department first made the distinction between fringe and non-fringe areas in West Sussex.

Within West Sussex, the Crawley district forms part of the London fringe, while the rest of the local authority area is outside the fringe. The distinction is a longstanding feature of the teachers’ pay system, dating back at least 30 years. Decisions on pay, including the current geographical criteria for designating fringe areas, are based on recommendations by the School Teachers’ Review Body (STRB). This independent body was established in 1991 to examine and report on matters relating to the statutory conditions of pay and employment of school teachers in England and Wales. The STRB can review the boundaries for the fringe if requested to do so by the Secretary of State.

London fringe area arrangements have been part of the mainstream school funding system since financial year 2013 to 2014. Since the school funding reforms were introduced in that year, they have been a feature of the local funding formulae in the five local authorities who have some of their schools within the London fringe area (Buckinghamshire, Essex, Hertfordshire and Kent, along with West Sussex), enabling an uplift to be applied to the affected schools’ budgets.