| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
3.11 am
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education and Employment (Jacqui Smith): Despite the lateness of the hour, I congratulate the hon. Member for Truro and St. Austell (Mr. Taylor) not only on securing this Adjournment debate on the issue of school funding, which is clearly important to hon. Members on both sides of the House, but on doing so at the start of an important day in the history of this Government's commitment to putting into our schools the resources that we all agree are important.
As a Worcestershire Member of Parliament, I share and have sympathy with the hon. Gentleman's view of the unfairness of the distribution system. I come from an authority that fares even worse than Cornwall in the standard spending assessment arrangements. Although I will not, therefore, be defending the current funding system, I will be defending the Government's commitment to increasing overall spending in our schools, as well as explaining the effects that that has had on Cornwall and the actions that the Government are taking to improve fairness and transparency in the funding of schools.
The first thing that I must reiterate is that the Government have delivered an overall increase, allowing for an extra £2.1 billion to be spent on education in 2000-01 and an education SSA increase of 5.4 per cent. across the country. On top of that, an extra £500 million has been made available for the standards fund, £50 million for support of school budgets and £14 million for excellence in cities authorities. There is £19 million extra spending headroom through the deferral of an increase in pension contributions and an extra £290 million was announced in the Budget.
Notwithstanding the way in which that is distributed across the country, that is a substantial real-terms increase in funding--equivalent to an increase per pupil in real terms of £180 this year, and of £300 since 1997. Under the previous Government, funding per pupil fell by £60 in real terms between 1994-95 and 1997-98. Our increases are significantly more than could have been delivered from putting 1p on income tax.
I have said that it is not my intention to defend the distribution system, but I must point out that the Government's overall funding increase has significantly benefited Cornwall. Cornwall's education SSA for 2000-01 is £199.6 million--an increase of £9.77 million or 5.32 per cent.
Mr. Paul Tyler (North Cornwall): Given the Minister's sympathetic comments about the distribution system, does she acknowledge the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Truro and St. Austell (Mr. Taylor), that the time to correct a discrepancy is when one is in a position to be more generous? I hope that she will at least give an
assurance that she will make representations to her right hon. Friends in the Cabinet that now is the time to correct the discrepancies.
Jacqui Smith: Later in my speech, I shall outline what the Government intend to do in that respect.
As the hon. Member for Truro and St. Austell points out, Cornwall's is not the best placed LEA, being 101 out of 150 LEAs in terms of funding per pupil. Nevertheless, the increases that Cornwall has received are substantial--not only in its SSA, but in its standards fund allocation for 2000-01 which, at £20.58 million, represents an increase of 82 per cent. on the 1999-2000 allocation; in its share of the additional £50 million announced in November, which is £483,000; and in its share of the additional £290 million announced in the Budget, which is more than £2.7 million. As the hon. Gentleman will be aware, the latter was not allocated according to the SSA formula, so schools throughout the country, and in Cornwall in particular, will receive increases of up to £50,000 per secondary school and up to £9,000 per primary school.
The hon. Gentleman mentioned capital expenditure. It may well be that schools in Cornwall feel that that is not yet adequate, and I do not suggest that we have addressed fully our inheritance from the previous Government of crumbling schools. However, this year we have spent three times as much on capital expenditure as was planned by the previous Government; and, in the new deal for schools 4 allocation alone, Cornwall received £5.7 million, which constitutes a significant contribution to improving schools' infrastructure.
I should like to take this opportunity to congratulate Cornwall's teachers, governors and pupils on their excellent results, with the percentage of pupils with five or more A-starred to C GCSE passes standing at 51.6 per cent., which is above the national average of 47.9 per cent. It is clear that the authority has been making good use of the extra resources provided by the Government, and that teachers, governors and pupils have been working hard to improve results.
The hon. Gentleman mentioned class sizes. The Government targeted money on fulfilling our pledge to reduce class sizes for five, six and seven-year olds. The hon. Gentleman appeared to dismiss that achievement, but the Government believe that it will have a lasting effect on children as they pass through the education system, and we shall make £620 million available to support that pledge. Allocations to Cornwall so far total £3.5 million, which has helped to reduce average key stage 1 class sizes in the hon. Gentleman's constituency to 24.9 from 25.4 in January 1997, and in Cornwall as a whole to 25.3 from 26.2 in January 1997. That additional investment in Cornwall has had a direct effect on reducing key stage 1 class sizes.
Mr. Matthew Taylor: I did not gloss over the figures for five to seven-year-olds, but I did make the point that overall class sizes have increased, with substantial numbers of pupils in older age groups in classes of more than 31. I am sure that the Minister will concede that,
despite the Government's belief that priority should be given to younger pupils, that is a cause for concern arising from the process.
Jacqui Smith: Overall in the country, the size of the average primary class has fallen, and average class sizes as a whole have fallen. Were secondary head teachers to use the extra money that they received--between £30,000 and £50,000--to reduce class sizes, the pupil-teacher ratio could be reduced by 0.4. We have put in place the money to enable our class size pledge to be met, and to ensure that some of the side effects identified by the hon. Gentleman do not occur.
It is important to consider the position with regard to early years. Since 1997-98, the Government have prioritised the provision of places for four-year-olds and five-year-olds. The funding available through the SSA and the nursery education grant has increased nationally by almost £400 million. That has enabled some 120,000 new, free early education places for three and four- year-olds to be created nationally across all sectors.
In Cornwall, 5,216 free four-year-old early education places are to be created during the summer term 2000, of which 3,697 were funded through Cornwall's under-fives SSA sub-block and 1,519 from nursery education grant. For three-year-olds, during 1999-2000, £40 million was made available and targeted on helping children in 65 local education authorities chosen on the basis of social need.
In autumn 1999, funding was initially given to the 57 most deprived authorities, using the Government's index of local deprivation, augmented by two additional child-centred measures. We then made available to eight more authorities, including Cornwall, extra funding to create three-year-old places for the spring term. In that way, Cornwall benefited overall from the Government's commitment to providing early years places and from specifically targeted funding that recognised the levels of deprivation in the county.
It is important to recognise that Cornwall has benefited from the Government's policy on education action zones. Although it is not in the hon. Gentleman's constituency, the zone covering Camborne, Pool and Redruth, which was approved by the Secretary of State in November 1999 and allocated a Department for Education and
Employment grant of £500,000 each year for three years and up to £250,000 match funding, will be important for the innovative initiative that it is proposing and for the fact that such innovation has knock-on benefits for other schools in the area.As I stated at the beginning, my hon. Friends and I have not attempted to defend the current system of local authority grant distribution. That is why the Government are undertaking a review. It was not possible to find a way forward as quickly as the hon. Gentleman and probably many other hon. Members would have wanted, but we were honest about that and are now looking for a longer-term way of reviewing that distribution. Because education accounts for about 40 per cent. of local authority revenue expenditure, the future of education funding makes up an important part of the Government's review.
The Government expect to publish a Green Paper later this summer, setting out a range of options for debate. We are seeking arrangements that will be fair between different parts of the country; which will be more transparent; and which will provide greater predictability and stability. They could include methods for improving the distribution of funding from central Government to make it fairer and to address the points that the hon. Gentleman outlined, giving LEAs three-year funding settlements so that they can plan ahead, and giving separate assessments for schools and LEAs, to increase the clarity and certainty of funding.
Our objective is to remove the worst of the disparities that exist in the country. We look to levelling funding up, not down. We will therefore take action to ensure that future distribution of funds is fairer, more rational and more satisfactory to the hon. Gentleman's constituents and mine. However, given the announcements--about which we are hopeful--that will be made later today, I ask hon. Members to acknowledge not only the challenge of distributing the money that is made available for education, but the challenge of providing more genuine resources for our schools. I suggest that the Government are already meeting that challenge; they will certainly meet it in future.
| Next Section
| Index | Home Page |