Grammar schools are complaining that they will lose out in the planned national funding formula due to their relatively advantaged intake, MPs were told yesterday.

During a House of Commons debate yesterday, Conservative MP Oliver Colvile said grammar schools in his constituency had written to him with concerns that they would miss out on funding “due to the deprivation issue” meaning they “do not get as good a deal as possible”.

Under the national funding formula, out for consultation, pupils eligible for free school meals or who live in deprived areas would attract extra funding. 

Mr Colvile said one of the letters was from Devonport High School for Boys headteacher Dan Roberts.

Mr Roberts “recognises that public services need to shoulder their fair share of the burden of public debt”, said Mr Colvile.

But he also “has real concerns that the latest proposals will cause serious damage to the one type of school that our current prime minister believes has the potential to transform education in our country,” Mr Colvile added.

The MP for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport invited schools minister Nick Gibb to meet him and some local grammar school leaders to “talk about how we could ensure that they can make savings and so that he can hear the case from the grammar schools too.”

Mr Roberts told TES this morning: “It’s very clear that the prime minister believes that grammar schools have a key role in developing education in this country. There’s a tension there could be increasing demands on grammar schools to address this, but at the same time their resources will be reduced.”

“More able children in the city are going to receive a reduction of 2.9 per cent, which doesn’t seem fair.”

“Incompetent feeder schools”

The debate, on school funding in Devon, followed a debate the previous day focusing on funding in northern schools.

At the earlier debate, Liberal Democrat education spokesman John Pugh suggested that secondary schools would have a “vested interest” in having “incompetent” feeder schools as a result of the funding formula.

He said the proposed changes would “probably be catastrophic” in areas set to lose money, and highlighted the government’s plan to take pupils’ prior attainment into account when allocating money to schools.

He said: “A perverse consequence of that is that, under the new formula, handing children on to secondary schools with good prior attainment de facto damages the budgetary position of the secondary schools, and their ability to sustain progress.”

He went onto ask schools minister Nick Gibb whether a secondary school would “lose out simply because it has good feeder schools”.

He added: “That scenario would discourage the kind of collaboration between secondary schools and feeder primary schools that the minister wants to see, because it would almost be in the vested interest of the secondary schools to have incompetent feeder primary schools - from a financial point of view, if not an academic one.”

However, Mr Gibb said, during the debate on the school funding formula and northern schools, that he did not think that secondary schools would behave in this way.

He said: “I do not believe that any professional I have ever met would deliberately not collaborate with another schools to improve pupils’ attainment simply to attract an element of the funding formula.”

The biggest factor affecting a school’s funding, under the proposed formula, would be their pupils’ level of deprivation, he added.

The national funding formula, out for consultation, is aimed at ironing out discrepancies in the way schools are funded around the country.

 Currently, local authorities can decide how to allocate funding to schools in their area, but from 2019-20 the money is set to bypass councils and go directly to schools.

Funding squeeze

The changes are being brought in amid warnings about real-terms cuts and the need to save £3 billion by 2019-20, which the National Audit Office has said “risks pupil outcomes”. 

Labour MP Liz McInnes said during the northern schools debate that she had received letters from headteachers of schools in her Heywood and Middleton constituency who said they appeared to be facing an 8 per cent cut in real terms “and that will lead to schools either going into deficit or having to make devastating cuts, having already made many efficiency savings.”

Unions released figures on Monday showing that every constituency in England will be hit by real-terms cuts to school funding.

Mr Gibb said that more than half of schools would gain funding under the formula, with a quarter of all schools gaining more than 5.5 per cent. However, he admitted “the outcome will be more mixed in the north west”.

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