Labour slams PM’s misleading claims at PMQ’s and calls on May to apologise and correct record

Angela Rayner MP, Labour’s Shadow Education Secretary, responding to Theresa May’s use of misleading statistics on education and schools funding at Prime Minister’s Questions, two days after the UK Statistics Authority rebuked the Education Secretary for using the same statistics, said:

“It is almost beyond belief that the Prime Minister would use this utterly discredited claim in the very week that the official statistics watchdog has made clear that the government should stop making it. Either this is a government in such total chaos that the Prime Minister was not even aware of the ruling by the UK Statistics Authority, or she has deliberately repeated a wildly misleading figure in defiance of independent advice and in the full knowledge that it is wildly misleading. 

“Her claims on school funding are no better. The Tories have already cut billions of pounds from school budgets, and per pupil funding is falling, not rising, in real terms.

“It is a clear breach of the ministerial code to deliberately mislead Parliament. The Prime Minister must now apologise, correct the record and accept the reality: her government has imposed swingeing cuts on schools and there is no reliable evidence for their claims to have improved standards.

“If austerity really is over, this month’s Budget must reverse the cuts to education and provide the investment our schools, nurseries and colleges so desperately need.”

Ends

Notes to Editors

·       Angela Rayner is writing to Prime Minister to demand that she corrects the record.

·    At Prime Minister’s Questions, the Prime Minister, Theresa May MP, said “next year per pupil funding is being protected in real terms.” 

·       Analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies found that per pupil spending, on both primary and secondary school pupils, is projected to fall in the next fiscal year.

https://www.ifs.org.uk/publications/13306 

The figures on projected per pupil spending are taken from figure 6.1a of the underlying data from the report. This can be found here:

https://www.ifs.org.uk/uploads/images/graphs/r150_data_tables.xlsx

·       Speaking at Prime Minister’s Questions, the Prime Minister said that “school funding this year is at a record high.”

·       The independent Institute for Fiscal Studies found that “total school spending per pupil has fallen by 8% in real terms between 2009-10 and 2017-18” and “funding for primary and secondary schools has been better protected and remains over 60% higher than in 2000-01, though it is about 4% below its peak in 2015.”
Institute for Fiscal Studies, 2018 annual report on education spending in England, 17^th September 2018

https://www.statisticsauthority.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/20181008_Sir_David_Norgrove_letter_to_SoS_for-_Education.pdf

·       A report by the National Audit Office found that schools face a total real terms cut to their budgets of £2.7 billion between 2015-16 and 2017-18. 
Source: National Audit Office, Financial sustainability of schools, p17, figure 4

https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Financial-sustainability-of-schools.pdf

·       Speaking at Prime Minister’s Questions today, the Prime Minister said that:

“We now see 1.9 million children in good and outstanding schools compared to 2010 and part of that is based on the reforms we’ve put forward into education[.]

·       The independent Education Policy Institute has previously called on Ministers to stop using this line, as it is not a reliable figure. 

They have also addressed the particular claim that this increase in a result of the government’s reforms, and concluded that it is “difficult to see what reforms they are attributing to them.” 

“The department frequently claims that the increase is due to the reforms put in place since 2010. It is difficult to see what reforms they are attributing to them to – given that it would mean improvements for a quarter of the school population. For example, the large structural reforms, through the expansion of the academies programme and the introduction of free schools, have so far resulted in little or no impact on overall attainment. The trends in the increase pre-date the introduction of the new national curriculum and new GCSEs.” (from page 6). 

Source: Education Policy Institute, Does the claim of ‘1.9 million more children in good or outstanding schools’ stack up?

https://epi.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/EPI_-1.9m_Good_outstanding_schools_analysis.pdf, p6

·       On Monday, Sir David Norgrove, Chair of the UK Statistics Authority, wrote to the Secretary of State for Education, Damian Hinds MP, to raise “serious concerns about the Department for Education’s presentation and use of statistics.” 

Source: UK Statistics Authority, letter to the Secretary of State for Education, 8^th October 2018.

https://www.statisticsauthority.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/20181008_Sir_David_Norgrove_letter_to_SoS_for-_Education.pdf

·       He addressed the specific claim of 1.9 million more pupils in good or outstanding schools, and said that:

“While accurate as far as it goes, this figure does not give a full picture. It should be set in the context of increasing pupil numbers, changes to the inspection framework and some inspections that are now long in the past, as an earlier letter to the Department from the Office of Statistics Regulation pointed out.”

https://www.statisticsauthority.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/20181008_Sir_David_Norgrove_letter_to_SoS_for-_Education.pdf

·       The Prime Minister did not set the statistic in this context.