Commenting on the launch of a consultation by the Department for
Education, Kevin Courtney, Joint General Secretary of the
National Education Union, said:
“This consultation on school funding is simply completing the
Government’s aim of redistributing school funding from poorer
areas to better-off areas.
“As the National Audit Office has found, over the last few years
there has been ‘relative re-distribution of funding from the most
deprived schools to the least deprived schools’. This inequitable
exercise has taken place at a time of rising poverty and children
from more disadvantaged backgrounds missing more school as a
result of the pandemic.
“If the Government wants to achieve fair funding for schools, it
must also find additional funding for schools. It is simply
impossible to redistribute funding fairly if the funding is
insufficient and some schools’ funding is reduced in order to
increase the funding for others.
“The Government must also ensure transparency of funding within
multi-academy trusts (MATs). While there are strict rules on how
local authorities distribute funding among their schools, there
are no controls on how MATs distribute funding among their
schools. They do not even have to tell parents how they are
distributing that funding. MATs are now in charge of the majority
of secondary schools and almost half of primary schools, so
proposals which ignore transparency of funding for these schools
are meaningless.”
