Core School Budget Allocations Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateDepartment: Department for Education
Julian Lewis
Main Page: Julian Lewis (Conservative - New Forest East)Department Debates - View all Julian Lewis's debates with the Department for Education
Core School Budget Allocations
Julian Lewis Excerpts(7 months, 2 weeks ago)
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Nick Gibb
The figures published in July were indicative figures. They are used by local authorities. Once the October census comes out with the pupil numbers, they then apply their local formula to those figures. That is the allocation that schools use for their budgeting, and that happens around December.
Over the period between 2021-22 and 2024-25, school funding has increased by 20%, so there has been a very significant increase. I agree with the hon. Member about the importance of cultural activities in schools, which is why we have a cultural education plan that is being worked on at the moment.
Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)
One reason why this Minister has been in his post so long is that successive Prime Ministers have judged him to be rather good at his job. For the benefit of the House, can he confirm that the civil servants who discovered the mistake made it known to Ministers at the first possible opportunity, and that Ministers made it known to the public at the first possible opportunity? Does that not reflect credit on our parliamentary democratic system?
Nick Gibb
I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for his kind comments. He is absolutely right: as soon as we knew about the error, I wanted to make sure that we were doing everything we could to rectify it and find a solution to the problem that officials and the Department had caused. That was my approach, and that is why we recalculated the whole of the national funding formula notional allocations as soon as we could and published that detail on 6 October.