Clause 101 - Funding of maintained schools
Education Bill [Lords]
2:45 pm
Mr Stephen Twigg (Minister of State (School Standards), Department for Education and Skills; Enfield, Southgate, Labour)
Let me first address the last of the three sets of comments made by the hon. Member for Southport. It is fair to say that the LGA has expressed several concerns about the ring-fencing arrangements that we have put in place, but I believe that they are a sensible approach to giving schools the stability that they have rightly been asking for and to assisting them in planning for the future.
It is true that there is both an upside and a downside to three-year budgeting. We discussed in an Adjournment debate in Westminster Hall a few weeks ago the trade-off between certainty and flexibility to meet the changing needs of a changing school population. That is one of the issues on which the Government are consulting at present. We welcome comments from colleagues of all parties, although the consultation is principally with schools and local governments. The hon. Gentleman answered his third point himself, in that we can give reassurance. The general trend of policy is indeed towards three-year budgets, which are advantageous to local government as well as to schools.
The hon. Gentleman’s first point was about the schools forums. The position that he described was accurate and correct—in a sense, he corrected the comments that he made on Second Reading—so I do not need to repeat it. He raised a perfectly reasonable point by asking, in the light of the role that schools forums were taking on, whether we needed to consider how they operated their constitution, voting procedures and so on. At this stage, the best thing for me to say is that we will consider whether any changes are required to the regulations dealing with the constitution and procedures of schools forums. We shall have to take the opportunity to have discuss those matters if revisions are needed in the light of the new decision-making powers. My Department’s preference would be to build on what we view, by and large, as very good practice in schools forums and to issue guidance that we hope will be widely adopted. In doing that, it is clear that we will need to take into account the kind of circumstance that he described from his constituency experience.
Finally, let me address the hon. Gentleman’s question about whether the measure is, in essence, a move to a national funding formula. It is worth while to emphasise that, although we are creating a dedicated schools budget and saying to local governments that they must spend the funds on their schools, we are also continuing with the LEA’s important role in schools funding. There will still be a local formula for distributing funds locally.
In recent changes to schools funding, we established the principle of having a core amount of money that any pupil in any part of the country would get, and then top-ups for factors such as deprivation, rural sparsity and so on. Clearly, we continue to debate in this House and elsewhere whether the mix between those two aspects is right, but even with the ring-fenced, dedicated schools budget, at the local level, the authority will still decide in conjunction with its schools on a local formula for distributing the money.