Schools: Funding — House of Lords, 2018-11-29
Topic: Education
Theodore Agnew (Conservative, Centre-right): The noble Lord is correct that the first 1% of the pay rise is expected to be funded by schools. We believe that that is possible within the efficiencies that I have mentioned. As for the Institute for Fiscal Studies, I believe that it includes within its figures the 16 to 19 year-olds sector, which has seen a tougher regime than the mainstream system: I acknowledge that. We are fully funding the teachers’ pay award beyond the 1%. This will be worth £187 million in 2018-19 and £321 million in 2019-20 On pensions, we propose to fully fund the increase in pension contributions recently announced for state-funded schools. We know that school budgets for the academic year have already been agreed and, in most cases, schools have allocated those budgets. That is why we have worked with the Treasury to get agreement to implement the changes from September 2019, rather than April 2019. We will consult on the best mechanism to distribute funding to individual schools and announce how it will be distributed in good time, before schools experience the pressures in September 2019 As we distribute this funding, we will be at the same time more fairly in line with the best available evidence. For example, by using a range of indicators to measure deprivation we are able to ensure our funding reaches all those pupils who need it. It is not limited simply to those who qualify for free school meals. Alongside the additional needs funding in the formula, we continue to deliver the pupil premium, with more than £2.4 billion this year. This is above the funding that we provide through the national funding formula. We will have invested over £13 billion in the pupil premium since 2011 to improve the outcomes for less well-off pupils I will now try to address specific questions raised by noble Lords. The noble Lord, Lord Bassam, asked about Barnet but I think he has gone. No, he has not—apologies. Under the NFF for 2019-20, schools in Barnet will attract £4,999 per pupil. This is an addition of £68 per pupil, or 1.3% compared to the 2017-18 figure. The total cash funding will increase by 3.2% and an additional £7.7 million, once rises in pupil numbers are taken into account. Just to explain how important that is, the marginal additional cost of educating one more pupil in a school is not the average per pupil amount. Barnet’s local authority received £48.1 million for high needs, an increase of £1.2 million compared to 2017-18 My noble friend Lady Eaton and the noble Lord, Lord Watson, referred to the EPI report and the rise in deficits. They are rising, which is a concern, and I am having to spend a great deal of time on that. We are offering advice to local authorities on how to deal with this, but to put things in perspective, 91% of maintained schools reported a cumulative surplus, or that they would be breaking even in 2016-17, with total surpluses of more than £4 billion against a total deficit figure of less than £300 million. The noble Baroness, Lady Morris, mentioned the shortfall in academy accounts. This is a myth that I want to slaughter early before it gathers traction. The figure referred to is driven almost entirely by an increase in impairment charges, which are non-cash changes to the value of land and buildings. Academies do not have to spend money on impairment charges, and a more realistic figure is that of the net cumulative reserves of the academy sector, which has seen an increase from £2.1 billion to £2.3 billion I share the concerns that the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Worcester and the noble Lord, Lord Storey, have about rural schools. That is why I attended the Lambeth Palace address earlier this week and met the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Ely yesterday, when we specifically discussed rural schools. I again make a pitch for multi-academy trusts, which are a very good solution to the problem. It is complicated in rural areas because of distance and how small many schools can be but, as I said in my address at Lambeth Palace, we are committed to always having a presumption against the closure of a rural primary school. They are the glue of these rural communities. My own son went to one, which faced closure last year. Since it was in Norfolk, the noble Lord, Lord Watson, would have been upset if I had intervened, but I did not. However, I am pleased to say that it has now joined an academy trust—one which I can tell your Lordships I have nothing to do with. It is important that we have sparsity funding, which is allocated to rural schools. The NFF allocates £25 million and we also give every school a lump sum of £110,000. When that lump sum is coupled with the sparsity factor, it provides meaningful support The right reverend Prelate made particular reference to a school where he said that the head teacher was struggling because the school had been asked to double the number of pupils. We have allocated a tremendous amount of basic need funding, with £7 billion during the current spending review between 2015 and 2021. Over the course of the Parliaments since 2010, we have increased the number of pupils by some 825,000 and they have all been funded. I want to reassure him on that The noble Lord, Lord Knight, asked about teacher recruitment and supply teachers, among other issues. I mentioned that we have just created a teacher recruitment service, which is now being rolled out across the country. It is a much more cost-efficient service than that provided in the market generally. Likewise, with supply teachers we have created another portal which has got the main supply firms in the country together. It has made them cap their fees and stopped the pernicious practice of charging a recruitment fee if the supply teacher becomes a permanent employee after a number of weeks. These may be only small things, but they all add up The noble Baroness, Lady Morris, raised issues about capital. We have committed some £23 billion to capital between 2016 and 2021 but, significantly, I should stress that we have also reduced the build costs per square metre by some 30%. This rises to 35% per square metre when improvements in efficiency and design are included, so we are very committed to that. The noble Lord, Lord Storey, gave an example of a friend who wrote about possible boiler problems in his or her school. I am not sure whether he said it was under a local authority or an academy but, if it was a local authority school, we make an allocation to local authorities every year of the school condition allowance. It is then for schools inside a local authority to bid in for that. If it was an academy and had more than 3,000 pupils, the academy trust is given an amount of capital which it can then choose to spend as it sees fit This leads me on to the BBC documentary "School", which I have not seen all of, although I of course will do so. However, I saw the first part and felt it was a very disappointing piece of journalism, because it was clearly set up to show how bad everything was. There are a number of challenges in that trust, but just on repairs one line from the journalist said that there were terrible, draughty windows and that the classrooms were therefore cold. When I looked up the figures for the school condition allowance, this trust receives over £1 million from that a year. The school in question—I think it is called Marlwood—is the biggest and, although we do not publish individual amounts per school, because the academy trust is free to use it as it sees fit, I can assure the House that there was plenty of money to deal with those windows. If it had a better call on its money than windows that increase heating costs, this is the sort of thing I get frustrated about. It is not all as one-sided as people think I am running out of time—my goodness, I apologise—and I had better sum up. On efficiencies in schools, I heard the comment from the noble Lord, Lord Watson, about the Harris Federation. The fact is that the Harris Federation is so efficient that it is able to employ centrally 80 school improvement teachers, who go out into its weaker schools—or ones it has just taken on—and provide the extra resource. That is one of the secrets of it being such a high-performing trust. Outwood Grange, a trust in the north of England, does a similar thing: it has 65 centrally employed school improvement teachers doing exactly the same and raising standards. It already has more than 900 pupils registering year-on-year for the schools that it took over from WCAT—a trust that failed—because of the improvements being seen.