Stone MP Sir Bill Cash has stepped up his campaign for fairer funding for Staffordshire’s schools after being told by the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Childcare and Education that there are anomolies in the current system.
Stone MP Sir Bill Cash has been campaigning for a fairer system for the allocation of funding for Staffordshire schools for many years – and had written to Sam Gyimah MP, Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Childcare and Education in July. The minister has now responded.
He said: “I agree with you that there are anomalies with the current school funding system, which means that current levels of funding no longer reflect pupils’ needs. We made a manifesto commitment to make the funding system fairer and we will come forward with proposals in due course. It is very helpful to have your detailed thoughts on how we could move to greater fairness.”
School children in Staffordshire have been consistently funded well below the national average and Sir Bill is determined to ensure that a new national formula is introduced at the earliest opportunity to ensure money is allocated more consistently across the country.
He says the existing funding model has no rationale and is clearly unfair – mainstream school funding has become more and more of a ‘mess’ with a tangle of funding caught up in the Minimum Funding Guarantee (MFG) and capping. He says the national funding formula allocating the same funding for all mainstream pupils nationally would resolve the problem of a child attracting very different levels of funding if they attend a school on one side of a local authority boundary rather than another.
For Staffordshire schools, Sir Bill has argued for a new formula-based approach introduced from 2016-17 and phased in over a three year period while appreciating the need for year-on-year changes to be manageable for individual schools.
