Dedicated Schools Grant

Claire Young Excerpts

Tuesday 6th May 2025 Westminster Hall

[Claire Young (Thornbury and Yate) (LD)]

It is an honour to serve under your chairship, Ms Butler. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Tewkesbury (Cameron Thomas) for securing the debate.

Investing in education is investing in our future, so we need to get it right. The national funding formula creates huge discrepancies in how children are supported in different authorities. My local authority, South Gloucestershire, has long been at or near the bottom of the funding league table, and that lack of investment is having a real impact on children. Thornbury and Yate is largely rural, but most of the rest of South Gloucestershire is urban. Generally, with all sorts of Government funding, when taken as a whole, it has suffered through not being rural enough for rural support but not having the concentrations of deprivation seen in some urban areas. Even within my constituency there is huge variation in the demographics of school intakes.

I recently wrote to the Minister about the case of one primary school in my constituency that I visited. It provides a good example of the pressures caused by the unfairness in the existing funding system. Staff at the school told me that it has developed a reputation for being particularly supportive of children with SEND, and thus has an unusually high proportion of children who require extra support. On top of that, it is being asked to support increasingly high levels of medical needs, which its already overstretched staff are not trained to meet. It also has a high number of children with English as a second language, and a third of its pupils qualify for pupil premium funding.

In many ways, the school’s intake is comparable to a school the staff visited in London, yet that school gets much higher per pupil funding simply because of the local authority it is in. That shows in the services that the London school is able to provide, from having specialist art and music teachers to having two teachers per class. Our children in Thornbury and Yate deserve more than what the funding currently provides.

The disparity is undermining the work that our local schools do and leaving them worse off. We need a fairer national funding formula that supports disadvantaged and rural schools, not just those in more affluent and urban areas, and recognises the wide variation within local authority boundaries.

[Edward Morello]

I agree 100% with my hon. Friend’s point. I have no doubt that in her constituency, as in mine, there is a similar problem: when the Government talk about a fully funded pay increase, it is based on a school average. In many rural places, we do not have the average because we have smaller class sizes, or we have single, large schools that cover a large geographical area and a large number of pupils, which are heavily disadvantaged as a result.

[Claire Young]

I absolutely agree. It is a particular problem for small rural schools, which often have small class sizes because the schools are small overall.

We need action on funding for special educational needs and disabilities, as too many children are being left without the support they need. For years, schools in South Gloucestershire have had to ask the Government to allow them to take money from the schools block to supplement the high needs block. That reduces the funding available for early intervention which, as we know, is so important for better outcomes. It also makes the funding situation worse as more children need higher-cost interventions at a later stage. The high needs block must be protected and expanded to reflect the growing demand and rising complexity in children’s needs.

South Gloucestershire is one of the authorities with a safety valve agreement, which is intended to help councils to manage large deficits in their high needs budgets. It was signed pre-covid, with targets that are unachievable thanks to the impact of the pandemic. Next year, when the agreement ends, the council faces a cliff edge in funding. It, and other councils in that position, face impossible choices between balancing budgets and supporting vulnerable children.

Furthermore, in the case of South Gloucestershire, the previous Conservative Government failed to provide the requested £30 million of funding to provide an additional 200 special school placements locally. As well as being better for the children, that would have reduced costs. Earlier this year, I had a meeting with the Minister and South Gloucestershire’s council leadership in the hope that this Government would take a more sensible approach, but the focus seems to be on providing spaces in mainstream settings. We support that as a goal, with extra funding for early intervention to make it possible, while recognising that there are children who need support now and did not get that early intervention. We also need funding for them.

I ask the Minister to think again about what works now, because otherwise another generation of our children will miss out. Without a solution to the ending of the safety valve agreement, the whole system could collapse, leading to longer waits, reduced provision and more children out of school. We need sustainable, long-term funding for children with high needs, and an end to short-term financial firefighting.