School and College Funding: The Midlands

[Mark Pritchard in the Chair]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered school and college funding in the Midlands.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Pritchard. I am pleased to have secured this important debate and grateful to the House authorities for granting it. I welcome to Westminster schoolteachers from across the midlands who have come down to listen to the debate and to hear what the Government have to say about how they will fix the crisis in our schools and colleges. I hope their journey will not have been wasted.

Before I go on, I put on record my huge admiration for our teachers, teaching assistants, lecturers and everyone who dedicates themselves to education in our schools and colleges in the midlands and beyond. They deserve so much better than their treatment by successive Conservative Governments. I also put on record my absolute support for and solidarity with the teachers and education staff in the National Education Union as they fight for fair pay and for the future of our schools and colleges. Teachers do not take action lightly; they take it as a last resort, and only because they have been pushed to breaking point while watching their pupils be failed by Ministers. They are taking action because of their commitment to education, not in spite of it. Polling shows that the public know this too—the majority back striking teachers.

I sought this debate because I want to address a simple fact: our schools and colleges are in crisis. The reason why they are in this state is no mystery. Between 2010 and 2020, school spending per pupil in England fell by 9% in real terms, funding per student aged 16 to 18 in further education and sixth-form colleges fell by 14%, and funding per school student in sixth forms fell by a whopping 28%. The consequences are all too clear: secondary school class sizes are the highest they have been in over 40 years, and primary class sizes are the highest in Europe. At the same time as pay was cut, year on year, teachers have worked more unpaid overtime than any other profession in the UK.

The impact on students and staff is hard to overstate. Teachers who went into the profession because they love education and teaching are finding it harder and harder to go on. One teacher from the west midlands told me

“the expectations are huge…the pressure unmanageable…and the rewards diminishing in every sense.

It is becoming harder and harder to find the positive every day.”

Another told me of the vicious cycle that develops: underfunding results in bigger classes and less support for students with special needs, which leads to more pressure on teachers and more staff absence.

The demands on teachers go way beyond what we should expect. While teachers’ pay has been cut, Government underfunding means that teachers increasingly have to dip into their own pockets to buy supplies. One in five are now estimated to buy everything from books and pens to rulers and glue sticks, and nearly half even buy food, clothes and soap for poorer pupils—stepping in where the state has catastrophically failed.

All of that has a predictable result. Staff recruitment and retention is in crisis and set to get worse: a quarter of all teachers and school leaders say they are considering leaving the profession for reasons other than retirement. That is backed up by the Government’s own statistics, which show that retention rates have declined since 2011 and that fewer than 60% of teachers are still in the profession after 10 years. Recruitment is in dire straits, too. The Government are now reaching less than 60% of their own target for secondary recruitment, and for some subjects the figures are even worse—just 36% for modern foreign languages, 30% for computing and an astonishing 17% for physics. That impacts learning, with a rising proportion of lessons being taught by teachers who do not have a relevant qualification. The problem has got so bad that one Coventry teacher told me of a student who by Wednesday had 10 out of their 15 lessons taught by cover staff. Perhaps nowhere in Coventry is the crisis in staff recruitment and retention felt more severely than at Coventry College.

I thank my hon. Friend for securing this debate. She is making an incredibly important point about recruitment. We recently saw the Prime Minister out with his strategy for getting more maths taught, but the Government are already failing to hit their own targets for maths teachers. Does it not say everything about this Government that we have, on the one hand, a big announcement about what is going to happen in schools and, on the other, abject failure to recruit maths teachers?

I completely agree. It is a slogan without substance, and the Government have had to accept that those targets will not be met.

Coventry College recently announced that it would cease offering apprenticeship provision from August, citing the extreme difficulty in recruiting and retaining teaching staff. This will have a severe impact on young people in the city, depriving them of opportunities, and it runs contrary to the Government’s own skills mission as set out in the levelling-up policy agenda.

Again, there is no mystery about what is happening with recruitment and retention: educators are voting with their feet after working harder and harder for less and less. Alongside rising workloads, teachers have seen their pay cut year after year—by around 13% in real terms since 2010. The Government’s pay offer would only make things worse. In September, they offered a “pay rise” of 5%, when inflation was, of course, running at 12.6%—that so-called pay rise was really a 7% pay cut. The Government’s latest offer of an additional one-off cash payment of £1,000 would not even be consolidated into pay next year, and is dwarfed by the average energy bill alone. What makes it even worse is that, according to NEU calculations, these proposals are not even fully funded; instead, they would require most schools to make further cuts to pay for them.

It is therefore little wonder that the latest pay offer was rejected by a staggering 98% of voting NEU members. This decisive rejection must surely make the Government come back to the negotiating table with an above-inflation pay rise. That would only start to undo the damage of a decade of falling pay, as the Government must also restore pay for further education teachers and help to address the severe challenges faced by colleges across the country, including Coventry College.

It is not just staff recruitment and retention that have been impacted by Government underfunding. Just last month, a Conservative Member secured a debate in this very Chamber to highlight that inadequate school funding had resulted in a severe decline in the quality and quantity of free school meals, impacting children’s health and education. The Member cited a school in his constituency that pays £2.80 a meal, but receives just £2.41 a meal in funding. I am an active campaigner for free school meals to be extended to all children, guaranteeing every child a hot, healthy meal each day. However, those meals must be just that—healthy and nutritious—and that requires funding. Just like funding our schools and colleges more broadly, this is an investment from which we all benefit, with studies showing that healthy free school meals improve children’s learning and health, helping with concentration and behaviour.

It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Pritchard. I congratulate the hon. Member for Coventry South (Zarah Sultana) on securing today’s important debate.

As MP for Stafford in the west midlands, I am delighted to speak on school and college funding in the midlands. I strongly welcome today’s debate, especially as fairer funding for schools and colleges has been one of my top five pledges as MP for Stafford. I am delighted that the Government recently announced that Stafford College would secure £28 million of new funding. That is for our new skills and innovation centre, which I recently visited and which will officially open later this year. That brand-new centre will develop construction and engineering workshops and hybrid vehicle technology facilities. It also has a 300-seat auditorium. I am confident that those new, state-of-the-art facilities will do much to foster and encourage digital and manufacturing skills across the midlands.

I am particularly grateful that Stafford College was chosen out of 16 colleges in England to receive that funding as part of the Government’s £1.5 billion further education capital transformation fund, which was launched to rebuild and transform colleges into fit-for-purpose spaces that meet the needs of today and the future. I was delighted that the Secretary of State for Education, my right hon. Friend the Member for Chichester (Gillian Keegan), visited me in my constituency a few weeks ago to see this fantastic site and the progress it has been making over the past few months.

The Secretary of State told me that nothing demonstrates the Government’s commitment more than equipping young people with the skills they need by investing in this new building. I would also like to thank Craig Hodgson, the principal of the college, for hosting us and Councillor Jeremy Pert from Stafford Borough Council for all the work he has done to support me on this project.

During her visit, the Secretary of State took time to speak to a group of students who are studying for apprenticeships, A-levels and T-levels. She spoke about her experiences of studying for an apprenticeship course, which inspired my local students. She listened to what they had to say about what they wanted the Government to invest in, the courses they were studying, the skills they hope to gain and their plans for the future. I thank her for her visit to my constituency, which was a fantastic example of the Government listening to what residents have asked for—investment in our further education.

In addition to supporting Stafford College, I have invested a lot of time over the past three years as MP for Stafford in visiting local schools, including Barnfields, St Patrick’s, St Pauls, Flash Ley, Marshlands and, just a few weeks ago, Wolgarston High School in Penkridge. There I met the headteacher to discuss funding needs for the school and to understand the struggles she faces when teachers go on strike without notice. I also spoke to the school’s mental health and wellbeing officer, who provides important support to the students. I am a long-term advocate for mental health in Stafford, and I call on the Government for more support in schools for mental health. It is not mandatory in every school. Wolgarston is a fantastic example of a headteacher taking the issue very seriously and choosing to invest time and money. I hope the Government roll that out in other schools. I also met very ambitious A-level politics students, whose questions were more aggressive than those on “Question Time”, and I enjoyed being kept on my toes by those local students.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Pritchard.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Coventry South (Zarah Sultana) on securing this important debate. I, too, echo her words and thank all the fantastic teachers, support staff, lecturers and many others who work in the education profession, from nursery through primary and secondary school to college and university, across the great city of Stoke-on-Trent and wider north Staffordshire, including Kidsgrove, Talke and Newchapel. It is an absolutely fantastic profession, and one that I was proud to spend nearly nine years in on the frontline, working day in, day out with our fantastic young people, who we were looking to make sure excelled into the future.

I am therefore proud to declare my interest as a paid-up member of the NASUWT and as someone whose partner works as an employee of Teach First, a fantastic teacher training organisation. She was also a secondary school teacher at a number of schools in Birmingham and London. I hope all those declarations are now on the books.

The reality is that school funding has increased by 44% per pupil since 2010-11, to £7,460 per pupil. The educational budget in 2023-24 is £57.3 billion, up 64% on 2010-11. In the 2021 spending review, it was a remarkable achievement of the Department for Education to secure £7 billion in additional spending. The Prime Minister and the Chancellor then came in to add another £4 billion on top of that over the next two years—2023-24 and 2024-25—which even the Institute for Fiscal Studies says is an 8% increase in real terms for England and Wales. The IFS also noted that spending in England kept pace with the 13% rise in pupil numbers between 2010 and 2023.

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for quoting the IFS, because that same IFS report said that the loss of funding in the further education sector was the biggest of any education sector, and that even the extra funding in 2020 and 2021 had been eroded by the rapid growth in student numbers. He needs to provide a much fuller description of that IFS report if he wants to refer to it, as I shall be doing when I make my contribution.

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for allowing me the opportunity to repeat the fact from the IFS that, in England, spending kept pace with the 13% rise in pupil numbers between 2010 and 2023. That is in answer to his specific question. It is positive that we are in a place where the IFS has recognised the investment that has gone into the education sector.

Ultimately, for levelling up to be achieved fully and to be delivered in places such as Mansfield or Stoke-on-Trent, we must create young people with the knowledge and skills they need to access the higher-skilled and high-wage jobs that we are so proudly bringing to our local area, such as the 9,000 jobs created since 2015 under Conservative rule of both the city council and the Government, including 2,000 linked to the Ceramic Valley enterprise zone and 500 thanks to brand-new Home Office jobs. We are tapping into the talent pool through colleges, local jobcentres and our university to ensure that we have local people in local jobs, which will be fantastic for our local area. That is exactly what we want to see.

In fact, we had a 5.1% increase in per-pupil funding at Kidsgrove Primary School. That is an astonishing increase. It will make a massive difference to the school, which absolutely needs that support.

Will my hon. Friend give way?

I give way to my hon. Friend and then I will happily come on to the hon. Member for North Shropshire (Helen Morgan).

In my hon. Friend’s wonderful speech, will he talk about T-levels, for example, and how we are putting some fantastic skills into local communities, as we are doing at Loughborough College?

At the Conservative party conference last year, I sat next to my hon. Friend, who is a fantastic champion of the T-level programme. The Minister—I served on the Education Committee when he was in the Chair—was also a fantastic advocate. T-levels such as the digital T-level offered by the City of Stoke-on-Trent Sixth Form College will truly transform people’s lives with that access to on-the-job training as well as the in-classroom opportunity. It is a fantastic scheme. I fully support the Department in all its efforts and success to date in rolling this out. As I promised, I give way to the hon. Member for North Shropshire.

The hon. Gentleman is making a passionate speech. I have met the headteachers of all my secondary schools in North Shropshire, and they tell me that last year’s pay rise was unfunded and that they are really struggling to recruit teachers in the key areas of languages, maths and science. Does he find that the teachers in his area are reporting the same kinds of difficulties and concerns about educating their young people going forward?

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for her fantastic intervention. Of course, her area faces challenges different from those faced by the city of Stoke-on-Trent, given that hers is a much more rural constituency with, I assume, higher rents and house prices in some areas than the average of Stoke-on-Trent.

When I was at the Department for Education, albeit for only 51 days under a certain former Prime Minister, I was delighted that one of the briefs was the recruitment and retention of teachers. In my very brief time there, I signed off on the 5% pay increase, as put forward by the independent pay body review, which was accepted in full—the highest increase in teacher salaries in 30 years—as well as on the manifesto commitment to deliver a £30,000-a-year starting salary, which is so important if we are to drive recruitment.

Of course, recruitment and retention have been an issue for many years, particularly in science, maths and certain other subjects. One of the challenges is that, rather than getting into the game of “Who’s going to give more grants, and to which subjects?”, we need to have a frank and honest conversation.

Ultimately, the Labour party says that it has a plan to recruit and retain more teachers. I would be delighted if Labour Members could reveal the specific details. They have told me where they will get the money from: they are going to remove the non-dom status—that is fine; that is their entitlement. What they have not said is what they will do differently. Are they going to increase salaries, including starting salaries? Are they going to increase the grants? Are they going to give more grants to more subjects? Are they going to nick talent from around the world by paying people to come here from other countries? That is their prerogative if they so wish, but the detail has yet to be supplied, despite the fact that I have repeatedly asked for it on the Floor of the House and been given some brush-off answers designed to get some Twitter clip—I seem to trend on Twitter quite successfully, almost as successfully as the hon. Member for Coventry South.