Concern is growing amongst groups who represent teachers, councils and Conservative backbenchers surrounding the Chancellor’s education funding reforms, and whether they’re fit to mitigate some of the discrepancies seen across different localities.
The formula is argued by the f40 group of education authorities to be too heavily weighted towards “additional needs factors” and will leave the core responsibilities of schools underfunded. The group, which represents the lowest funded education authorities in England, states that ‘[f]unding for individual schools with similar pupil characteristics is inconsistent and unfair.’
They’ve issued a letter to the Prime Minister outlining their concerns on the commitment of funding to the areas they represent; however, they don’t believe that the implementation and continued use of averages will see many schools and pupils lose out. They state that the new formula ‘creates distortions which risk replacing one unfairness with another.’
It’s not just the f40 group that opposes the new funding formula. Tory backbenchers have opposed the proposals to increase the intake of poorer deprived students by grammar schools by offering lower pass marks. Ministers in opposition of this have criticised the move as patronising.
To represent true social mobility, schools and pupils should be armed with a rich variety of routes to achieve their potential which recognises the different strengths presented by the individual. Lowering the pass mark makes the assumption that those from deprived areas will struggle academically, which, of course, isn’t always the case.
How an individual’s skills and strengths, or indeed their perceived weaknesses, present is non-discriminatory and certainly not limited to being influenced by where they grew up. This backlash serves to highlight that the ‘one size fits all policy’ within education is not fit for purpose. The government has committed to further funding of technical education for post-16 in its spring Budget – however, the schools funding proposal has not been met with the same welcome.
The £320m in funding pledged for the development of 140 new free schools, many of them expected to be grammar schools, has been criticised in light of the pledge to fund improvements in existing schools is measly in comparison.
It raises the question, if the government has a renewed commitment to traditionally non-academic routes, why has this been restricted to post-16? As many schools battle with cuts to their budgets leaving them with no option but to remove some GCSE courses and subjects not considered a core academic priority, schools do not have the economic wiggle room to explore a more diverse range of subjects, limiting the options for those who will suffer the consequences – the pupils. Shouldn’t the path to attribute the same prestige to technical education as academic subjects be paved far earlier than post-16 provision when pupils may have already disengaged with the education system due to lack of choice? By not doing so, we risk that journey remaining an uphill struggle and doing a disservice to those, wherever they come from, who may find their strengths lie in this field.
