Education and Skills Bill
5:00 pm
Jim Knight: I bet that Dorset and Worcestershire get less money than the London borough of Havering.
Very soon, we will start the process of consulting on a new funding formula for schools—obviously up until the age at which compulsory schooling ends. We will set out our intention there to explore 14-to-19 funding as an option at that point. So we will set out the beginnings of a process that will help us to arrive at a new system to start from 2011-12, when the current funding settlement completes. We accept that the spend-plus methodology that we have used to date can be improved to make it fairer. However, in the end we completely believe that it is right to reflect need in our funding allocations, as well as the ability to recruit where recruitment costs are greater and therefore you have to pay people more money. It is a complicated issue, as everyone here who is trying to understand it will appreciate, but we are confident that what we have got is relatively fair. For the next period, we want it to be even fairer.