Councillors from Devon County Council were in London this week as part of a national campaign to highlight unfair funding for the education sector.
Councillors Richard Jefferies, Lead Member for Children’s Services, and Denise Bickley, Cabinet Member with responsibility for services that support young people with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND), joined others from the f40 group of local authorities to make the case for Devon.
The f40 group represents 43 local authorities among the lowest funded in England.
Devon schools currently receive just under £5,000 less per mainstream pupil for Gross Dedicated Schools Grant funding, while Devon’s SEND funding is 60% less than the highest funded Local Authorities.
Together, they’re calling on Government to reform the SEND system to prioritise early intervention and inclusion in mainstream education; provide investment and resources for schools to meet rising demand; and improve the National Funding Formula to ensure fair distribution of funding across all councils.
Speaking outside parliament, Councillor Richard Jefferies said:
“We want to highlight the unfair funding that different areas across the country get for their education.
“Particularly that’s the case for Devon where we also have to deal with the challenges around rurality and remoteness.
“We want government to recognise that where lots of services are being delivered elsewhere in the country in areas of high density, those same solutions aren’t available for rural areas like Devon.
“Part of that is not recognising that remoteness plays a part in children’s education and wellbeing. Remoteness, it seems, is recognised in the government’s funding formula for adult social care but not for children’s social care.
“So, we’re asking that question – why the government recognises rurality and remoteness for adult social care, but not for children’s education.”
Councillor Denise Bickley, said:
“It’s simply not fair that Devon’s children get a lot less funding than counterparts in other authority areas.
“The way the funding formula results in such issues in areas such as the Southwest leads to inequalities and a system that needs such major improvements, with insufficient funding to right the imbalance.
“If you think about how we have so many small schools in Devon that still have all the same fixed costs, but don’t have the pupil numbers to attract sufficient funding, and yet they still need to operate because otherwise we’d have children across the county without access to a school nearby.
“That’s just not fair.
“We are however delighted that ‘inclusion’ is going to be further up the agenda and that Ofsted are going to be focusing on that, which is fantastic.
“However, if we’re looking at our mainstream schools becoming more inclusive, they need to have both the resources to be able to change their way of working to make sure they feel welcoming to all children, and educators need to feel empowered to adapt curriculums to suit needs – not force all children to be in education for the ultimate goal of taking GCSEs and the constant assessments leading up to it.
“We need the long-awaited White Paper to deliver. We need a clear steer now coming out of government and some clear finance for it.”
