6. What is the Minister doing to ensure that schools are adequately financed? OAQ53785

Thank you very much, Leanne. I have taken action to support budgets for local authorities in order to safeguard front-line services in schools. Education funding remains a key priority for me and for this Government, in spite of continued austerity.

Speaking to headteachers in the Rhondda, it seems that their job is as much about clever accounting as it is about providing direction, leadership and drive to staff. In the local authority that covers the Rhondda, some secondary schools are more than £0.5 million in the red. There's pressure to balance the books, but services have already been cut to the bone, so the only way now to make those further cuts is to make large numbers of unsustainable staff redundancies. This, of course, will have a negative impact on the education of our children, and it's their education that should be our top priority.

I've raised the issues of what the teaching unions say is almost £0.5 billion—almost a fifth of all spending allocated for schools—of the education budget being kept from the front line because it's retained by local authorities or consortia. Now, I know that you dispute that figure. So, what advice and support can you give to our leaders in education who face very difficult financial decisions in the immediate future unless you make some changes?

Thank you, Leanne. I don't doubt for a minute the significant challenges that many headteachers are facing with regards to school budgets. It is important to recognise that the responsibility for day-to-day funding of schools lies with individual local education authorities. Like you, I share the ambition of ensuring that as much money gets to the front line as possible, and that's, for instance, why we took the decision to ensure that the £21 million for professional development was passported straight to individual headteachers.

Whatever the figure is, it is a source of great concern to me that any money that should be in the schools budget is being held inappropriately, either at LEA level or at consortia level, or, indeed, that there is a duplication of funding from LEAs and consortia. After all, the consortia are run by their constituent parts, and it would be strange indeed, wouldn't it, for a local authority to allow a regional consortium that it runs to duplicate spending when those budgets, as you quite rightly identified, are tight. 

I am carrying out work centrally within Government to ensure that the direct grants that we have control of are being used appropriately and that that money is getting to the front line. But in the work that is being carried out by the Children, Young People and Education Committee, as I'm sure you're aware, there is not a consensus on whether moving to a system of direct funding of schools, bypassing both the LEA and the regional consortia, is a policy that has a consensus behind it. Indeed, your own education spokesperson feels very strongly that that should not be the case.

As you said, Minister, we need to ensure that funding reaches the front line. To be fair, programmes such as twenty-first century schools have provided much-needed funding for local authorities to improve school buildings and other aspects of school life, but, of course, that doesn't help the revenue situation of existing schools, particularly when they don't always tick the right funding formula boxes. For example, as I've raised with you before, in the Monmouthshire local authority area, schools have traditionally received less funding by virtue of the fact that they have fewer children accessing free school meals. Now, I can understand the reason for having that aspect of the formula, but that does mean that Monmouthshire schools have received less over time even though there are, of course, children going to those schools who are from disadvantaged backgrounds. So, my question to you is: how are you ensuring that the funding formula does work overall and does fairly fund local authorities and schools in different parts of Wales so that our children do have the best start in life?

As the Member will be more than aware, the decision on individual funding for schools is a matter for each individual local authority. With regards to the funding formula, I think the Member is referring to the funding formula for local government as a whole. You will be aware that there is a funding formula review group that regularly looks at different aspects of the revenue support grant scheme. My understanding is that, certainly, last year, there was a representative from Monmouthshire council on that very group and had the ability to influence the data and the formula as it was undertaken. Both myself and the local government Minister have said that we are more than happy to engage with individual Members who may have suggestions on how the formula operates, but I have to tell the Member, when given the opportunity earlier last year to change issues around the indicator-based assessment for education, it was local government representatives themselves that decided not to proceed with that change.