Claire Young

As we know, not all local education authorities are created equal. For those like South Gloucestershire, where schools are among the lowest funded in the country, the average rise quoted will not make up for years of underfunding. As I recently raised in this House, it is reported that two thirds of South Gloucestershire schools will be in the red next year, which is having a massive impact on children and young people in my constituency. I shall set out some of the pressures that are making that situation worse and ask the Minister how the spending review will help to tackle them. The first is the underfunding of staff costs. The Government are not fully funding the 4% pay-rise for teachers and are expecting schools to find a quarter of the amount from efficiencies within their budgets. Coupled with the underfunded national insurance reimbursement, this is placing a massive pressure on budgets. Can the Minister explain what these efficiencies would look like. I can tell her what things already look like in our schools before these cuts. In my local schools, clubs, trips and activities have been axed. Qualified teaching assistants have been replaced by cheaper apprentices. Class sizes have been breached and staff shared across year groups, or even across several schools. Each school will be asked to cough up tens of thousands of pounds that they simply do not have, and this will disproportionately hit small rural schools where the staff budget makes up a high proportion of the total. SEND pose challenges nationwide, but areas such as South Gloucestershire where school funding is lowest and where schools have struggled with a huge high-needs deficit, are hit particularly hard. The spending review says in relation to SEND that the Government will “set out further details on supporting local authorities as we transition to a reformed system as part of the upcoming local government funding reform consultation.” There is, however, no reference to the legacy safety valve agreements. The two-year extension of the statutory override is a temporary relief and does not solve the underlying problem. Schools and local authorities need to be able to plan ahead, so what assurances can the Minister give authorities such as South Gloucestershire whose safety valve agreements are coming to an end, and when will those authorities have certainty about the future funding arrangements?