Gavin is calling for more to be done to secure fair funding for South Staffordshire schools, following a Statement made today by the Minister of State for Schools.
Mr. David Laws MP announced this morning that the Government would be setting up a £350 million fund to help support schools with the lowest allocations.
In his Statement, Mr. Laws said: “We now want to make funding fairer at the national level by addressing the distribution of funding between local authorities... Today, I can confirm that in 2015/16, we will take the first huge step towards delivering this fairer national funding... This will be the first time in a decade that funding has been allocated to local areas on the basis of the actual characteristics of their pupils and schools, rather than simply on the basis of historic levels of spending.
“The case for action is so strong that we intend to act immediately to deliver a substantial £350m boost to schools in the least fairly funded local authorities in the country. We will be able to achieve this without any local authority receiving a cut to its per pupil schools budget. The extra money will be allocated in April 2015, for the 2015/16 financial year. No local authority or school will lose from this proposal, but around 4 in 10 areas will gain.”
Gavin , however, is concerned that these changes will do little to improve funding for pupils in South Staffordshire, despite the constituency being in an area ranked 140 out of 151 education authorities in the UK.
Gavin has been campaigning to achieve fairer funding for schools in South Staffordshire since his election, in 2010.
In a recent Parliamentary Question, Gavin asked what the Department for Education was doing to close the traditional funding gap between schools in the County of Staffordshire and in the local authority areas of Wolverhampton, Dudley, Walsall and Birmingham.
In South Staffordshire, the average overall spending per pupil is £5,129 compared to the nearby/neighbouring authority of Wolverhampton, which receives £930 more
Gavin said: “This announcement is definitely a step in the right direction, but it goes nowhere near far enough. I intend to keep up the pressure on Ministers to ensure that pupils in South Staffordshire get a fair deal, the best deal and the right deal.
“Our students continue to achieve impressive results but, for too long, our pupils have been receiving hundreds of pounds less in funding, per head, than students in urban areas. I will say that again. Hundreds of pounds. This cannot go on. South Staffordshire students deserve an equal investment in their education and their future, and I will not rest until I see that this has been achieved.”
Gavin is a member of the f40, a cross party group that acts on behalf of the lowest funded Education Authorities and has been campaigning for a fairer deal since the 1990s.
Last year, he joined over fifty Conservative colleagues in writing to the Secretary of State for Education to back his plans for a new national funding formula and call for a fairer deal on school funding to start as soon as possible.
Mr. Law’s announcement follows a consultation that the Government launched into the school funding formula, late last year.