Clarke speaks on school funding crisis
Education Secretary Charles Clarke has spoken to Parliament about what his department is doing to prevent a repeat of this year’s school funding crisis.
Despite increased education funding over recent years, the introduction of a new funding formula this year left some schools with severe financial problems. The situation led to a row between the Government and Local Education Authorities over who was to blame for schools being left short.
The Government is keen to avoid any repeat of the embarrassment, which has allowed the opposition to attack on education despite big investment, and led to MP Barry Sheerman suggesting in a select committee that the Government ‘snatched defeat from the jaws of victory’.
Mr Clarke appeared to back this view in Parliament where he stated: ‘since 1997, our schools have improved beyond all recognition… However, I recognise that a significant number of schools have faced funding difficulties this year. I would like to put on record my appreciation for the hard work of head teachers and LEAs across the country to manage through these difficulties.’
The Education Secretary made the case for schools having a greater say in their own budgets, and he has put constraints on spending by local authorities so as to ensure that their central education spending does not increase faster than that allocated to schools themselves.
He acknowledged the ‘turbulence’ that funding changes had caused for school finances and management, and promised not to cut the Standards Fund, and to top it up in line with inflation. This amounts to around £800milllion extra funding for schools in reversed cuts, which will be allocated in the autumn to ensure schools have time to plan.
Mr Clarke did hint that measures announced today might not resolve the difficulties when he promised to look at their results ahead of the 2005-6 school year.
The Liberal Democrat education spokesman Phil Willis insisted that the statement did nothing to tackle the current year’s funding crisis.
He also took issue with the extra £800m designation for the coming two years, insisting that it was merely ‘a restoration of the money that he took away from them during this year’s settlement’.
This was ‘the sort of sleight of hand we have now come to expect from the Secretary of State’, he claimed in an interview on BBC News 24 this afternoon.
However, the Lib Dem spokesman warmly welcomed Mr Clarke’s decision to give schools greater planning time for their financial allocations, describing it as a ‘first class idea’
‘That is good sense, and we applaud the Secretary of State for doing it’.
But he added that his party had actually requested such a move from the Government a year ago, claiming that it had been rejected at the time by Schools Minister David Miliband.
