It is the end of the school week and chattering children in neat blue sweatshirts are piling aboard buses that will ferry them to homes scattered throughout local villages. What the children don't know is that they are a stark example of an iniquitous postcode lottery which has grown up in school funding due to a system of arcane rules and bureaucratic muddle, and has left schools trying to attain national education standards with vastly differing resources.
Critics describe the system of funding as unfair and damaging for many pupils' prospects.
Schools a few miles apart, despite having similar catchment areas, can have budgets which differ by hundreds of thousands of pounds a year. We now have a national education system, a national examination system, a national curriculum and national inspection, and yet people are being expected to meet these criteria with inequitable amounts of money,' he said. The anomalies have grown up since the 1970s when schools were given differential funding levels to try to balance social differences. Local education authorities were also allowed to decide how much top-up money they gave to schools. Melbourn School's problem comes because of a quirk in the postcode system which goes right to the heart of the funding issue.