Schools Funding

Julian Huppert Excerpts

Tuesday 29th April 2014 Westminster Hall

[Dr Julian Huppert (Cambridge) (LD)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Worcester (Mr Walker)—it was a pleasure to work with him on this issue—and all the F40. My focus has been on schools funding in Cambridgeshire. We get the least per pupil as a basic amount and we have been underfunded for some 30 years. That is a very serious issue, which has affected us very seriously. I first campaigned on it when I was still at school; the campaign was led by the now Baroness Brinton. I have also worked on it as a county councillor and as a Member of Parliament. It has been a long fight by many people. Councillor Peter Downes, when he was head of Hinchingbrooke school, campaigned on the issue. Cambridgeshire Schools Forum, led now by Philip Hodgson, has campaigned on it. Over the decades, it has affected us very heavily, and ultimately that is not for any good reason; poor decisions made by the county council in the 1980s have left us with this situation.

We are so far behind. Cambridgeshire gets £600 per pupil per year less than the English average. That is about £250,000 for a typical primary school. Comparisons have been made with Oxfordshire. Oxfordshire gets more money per pupil now than Cambridgeshire will get with the extra money, so I will accept the praise in the Oxford Mail for my lobbying campaign—I was delighted to see it there—but I do not think that one can feel particularly sorry for Oxfordshire, whose pupils will continue to get more than pupils in my area and others in Cambridgeshire.

We are seeing real problems as a result of the continued underfunding. We are seeing the achievement gap widening, because there are simply not the resources in the schools to be able to do the work that is necessary to close that gap. Fantastic work is done by dedicated teachers. Excellent staff are doing their best, but with such scarce resources, right at the bottom end, it will always be a challenge.

Despite the fact that the issue had been raised for so many years, the previous Government did not do anything to fix it. They did not help the people in Cambridgeshire; they did not ensure that we got the fair amount that we deserve. That is why I was so delighted when, after much lobbying by me as well as many others, my right hon. Friend the Minister for Schools announced that we would get a substantial amount of extra money— £20.5 million in Cambridgeshire. In fact, that is less than half the gap between us and the English average, although of course the English average will go up. It will help; it is incredibly welcome, but it is not all that we need.

We in Cambridgeshire have taken the approach of saying thank you. Just yesterday, I handed in to the Minister for Schools a petition with about 2,000 signatures on postcards, pieces of paper and online to say how much people in Cambridgeshire want to get this extra money. We need it, and we need it soon. The money will go some way towards starting the change that is needed. I agree with all the hon. Members who have said that this can only be the first step on the way to a proper fair funding formula that makes sense, that starts off not based on historical numbers but by working out what is needed for schools and pupils. This is nothing like the end of the road.

Philip Hodgson, the chair of the Cambridgeshire Schools Forum, has said that he is

“pleased the Government has at last recognised the problem but the extra money is needed now.”

Schools in Cambridgeshire and, I am sure, in other areas face problems in this financial year as well. Having to wait until the next year will cause problems for schools that have been pared to the bone for 30 years. We are having to try to cope with decades of underfunding—chronic underfunding—which has hit the infrastructure and everything else in those schools. It makes it harder to adapt. We need some sort of immediate relief. If anything more could be done, that would be great, but most importantly we need to get this money; we need to get it in full; and we need that real and sustainable fairer funding system to last beyond 2016.

There is more to be done as well in terms of capital money and to make sure that places such as Cambridgeshire can continue to build the schools that we need. We are a fast-growing county and we need to have money not only to pay teachers but to build schools. We have problems with sixth-form funding, and I hope that the Minister will have news to share with us on those matters. We would like that assurance, and I would like an absolute assurance from the shadow Minister that if his party were in Government, it would continue to give us the fair funding that we deserve. I say a big “Thank you” to the Government. We need our £20 million, and we will be grateful for it and for anything more that can be done.