Education Funding: Distribution

Chris Coghlan Excerpts

Wednesday 28th January 2026 Commons Chamber

[Pippa Heylings]

I agree with the hon. Member. It is exactly why we need this debate at the national level. I recognise the work undertaken by the f40 fairer funding campaign, which has provided comparative historical data for the whole country, exposing the huge variations in funding allocations per pupil by local authority. Nowhere is that unfair disparity more clear than in my constituency. Cambridgeshire remains in the bottom quartile nationally for the dedicated schools grant and for high needs block funding per pupil. We rank 133rd out of 151 local authorities in 2025-26. That ranking has been the same for more than a decade, despite the unprecedented growth in Cambridgeshire. The consequences are stark.

If Cambridgeshire schools were funded to the same level as Lincolnshire—a shire county funded close to the national median—they would receive an additional £23.8 million every single year. That equates to roughly £118,000 a year for a typical primary school—think of that. Equally, if Cambridgeshire were funded to the same level as neighbouring Peterborough, schools would receive around £33 million more annually. That is the scale of the gap we are talking about, and it is impossible to justify. This chronic underfunding interacts directly with the crisis in special educational needs and disabilities provision.

[Chris Coghlan (Dorking and Horley) (LD)]

My hon. Friend is raising incredibly important points on the distribution of funding, but does she agree that the distribution of funding during life stage is also important? [Interruption.] According to the Early Intervention Foundation, the NHS is spending £3.7 billion a year on the cost of late intervention. In theory, the Government could spend an extra £3.7 billion on early intervention on SEND at no extra net cost to the Government.

[Pippa Heylings]

My hon. Friend makes a hugely important point, and we have just heard agreement from across the Chamber about the importance of both the geographic distribution of funding and to which age groups it is distributed.

The underfunding interacts directly with the crisis in special educational needs and disabilities provision. Funding has been historically low in our county, and it cannot meet the rising demand. While there has been a 72% increase in high needs block funding since 2017, the demand for education, health and care plans has risen by 91% in Cambridgeshire over that same period.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Minister for School Standards (Georgia Gould)]

I thank the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire (Pippa Heylings) for securing this debate on this important matter. I really appreciate her taking the time to meet me and lay out her concerns in person. We had a very constructive conversation. I echo her thanks to all the brilliant teachers and staff who work so hard in her constituency. I also thank my hon. Friend the Member for Truro and Falmouth (Jayne Kirkham), who came to speak to me about similar issues, the work of the f40 group, and the need to support not just schools, but, more widely, the professionals who wrap around schools in communities around the country.

I want to start where the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire ended, which is with the stories of families. I have travelled around the country speaking to thousands of parents and young people, and sadly, the experience she set out is all too common: parents’ fight for support, the exhaustion of having to navigate different systems, and parents having to give up their jobs to make a full-time job of trying to get support for their children.

[Chris Coghlan]

On the point about the terrible fight that families face, the Minister will know that I wrote to the Education Committee to pass on the testimony of 653 families from across 114 local authorities about harmful, unethical or unlawful behaviour by local authorities on SEND. These testimonies have 195 references to suicide. One of them said:

“My child now has ptsd, has lost the full use of their arm, is covered in scars from failed suicide attempts”.

The Education Committee wrote to me saying that these testimonies corroborated its findings about the failures in local authority governance. Does the Minister agree that, on SEND, there can be no case for weakening EHCP children’s rights, and that families’ trust in local authority governance has collapsed?

[Georgia Gould]

The stories the hon. Member has collected are unimaginably awful, and I commend him for listening to families and engaging with the Education Committee. We are taking its report very seriously; it is one of the documents informing our approach to reform. Conversations with families around the country are informing it, too. We have been clear that we need more support earlier. He talked about the critical nature of early intervention, and families have told us about that. We need greater partnership and earlier support, but families are also very clear that we need a system that protects their legal entitlement to additional support in education. What we have seen, and the stories we have heard today, show the failure to invest in early intervention.

The hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire talked about the urgent need to bring forward the reforms. We said that we were determined to bring them forward in the first part of this year, and we are working very hard on that. However, we want to ensure that the voices of parents, young people and teachers are at the heart of decision making, and we have taken the time to do the further engagement. The proposals that we will take forward are strengthened by that engagement, and by the contribution of families and Members across the House.

However, we have not been waiting to invest and to take action. We have already invested in Best Start in Life hubs, and in leads on special educational needs and disabilities. We have put £740 million into capital for specialist places. We have announced a further £3 billion of capital for this year, and we will set out how that is to be distributed across the country. Just recently, we announced a further £200 million in support for teacher training, and we will make it mandatory for teachers to have continuous professional development on special educational needs and disabilities.