School funding needs fundamental reforms

http://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/apr/13/school-funding-needs-fundamental-reforms

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No doubt governing boards across England were pleased to see your coverage of school budgets as they consider how they are going to balance the books in the coming financial years. However, one of the statements in your editorial (7 April) gives very much the wrong impression; you conclude that beneficial changes have meant “all schools are treated in a similar way”.

School funding is hideously complicated, and in fact the result of changes to funding allocations made by central government over the past five years has been to increase the differences between similar schools in different parts of the country. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has charted the increasing variations from the mean of funding per pupil over a long period.

The National Governors’ Association was disappointed that the coalition government did not undertake the much-talked-about fundamental reform of allocations, and the next government needs to be brave enough to tackle this to make sure pupils do get a fair deal wherever they live. This is a hard decision to make and one which would obviously be easier at a time of increasing public funding; redistribution over the next few years will mean losers as well as winners, and no politician wants to see children with “save our school” banners on the local news. But the current funding system is indefensible and will be shown more and more clearly to be so in the coming parliament, where times look to be increasingly austere for schools.Emma KnightsChief executive, National Governors’ Association

• You report that schools face deep cuts, possibly by as much as 12% in spending per pupil, whoever wins the election (Analysis, 7 April). This would be a disastrous act of human, social, cultural and economic self-immolation. There is a way to prevent it, consistent with fiscal restraint sensibly conceived. Education should be reclassified as capital expenditure.

In a global information and knowledge economy, the most important form of capital is human capital. That being so, spending on the development of intellectual skills should be treated as investment. It is the precondition of improved productivity, essential to sustainable growth, improved pay and equality. We must make inroads into the vast gap between what the state spends on average per household on education and the fees paid by wealthy parents to independent schools to advantage their children.

The ONS may say this is not in accordance with international conventions. That would not be a compelling argument. The UK can publish parallel sets of statistics, on the old and the new basis. There’s no need to fear punishment by the financial markets, which will see the future benefit to the UK of investing more in education.

This is not an option which the Conservative party has allowed itself, with its pledge to balance the budget on both current and capital account, but the Labour party has left itself a wider freedom on capital investment.

Of course education spending would need to be designed and disciplined so as to repay the investment. That would mean, inter alia, a rebalancing from the simple-minded bias in favour of STEM subjects. Vital as these are, so too is teaching students to make independent and critical judgments, to be mindful, to be articulate, to develop imaginative and creative faculties. This array of abilities will help us to prosper in more than just instrumental and economic terms. Alan HowarthLabour, House of Lords