Education secretary Gavin Williamson has accused his shadow Labour counterpart, Kate Green, of moaning and complaining after she challenged him to explain a “stealth cut” to school funding.
Shadow education secretary Ms Green raised concerns over the amount of help offered by the National Tutoring Programme to pupils in receipt of free school meals, adding: “Changes to the school census date mean that schools are also losing out on thousands of pounds of pupil premium funding for those students.
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The change to the way pupil premium money is allocated was described as “scandalous” and “sickening” by teachers and heads when they became aware of it earlier this year.
The Department for Education is yet to quantify exactly how much money schools will lose out on as a result of the change.
Gavin Williamson under fire over pupil premium funding ‘stealth cut’
Ms Green said today: “Will the secretary of state now come clean and publish his department’s full financial analysis of the funding lost to schools from this pupil premium stealth cut?”
Mr Williamson replied in the Commons: “[Ms Green] forever moans and complains about the resources, the extra resources that we have been putting into schools.”
He went on to defend the government’s spending record for schools, with Ms Green countering: “Are headteachers moaning when they say the pupil premium stealth cut means they won’t be able to pay for speech and language therapy or a teaching assistant or additional small-group sessions?”
Ms Green said the government is “not serious about catch-up” support for pupils, with Mr Williamson replying: “This government is delivering real increases to schools right across the board.”
Paul Whiteman, general secretary of school leaders’ union the NAHT, said: “The government is giving with one hand while knowingly taking away with the other.
“A significant number of children appear to have become eligible for help via pupil premium during the pandemic and these children will now not receive any additional funding for another whole year. The children who are losing out are exactly those children most in need of additional support.
“The government may say ‘no child left behind’, but with this simple ‘administrative tidy-up’ they have found a way to snatch back funding from schools and to further entrench educational disadvantage for the poorest families.
“The government must put this right. They must come clean about what they have saved and they must put that money back into schools budgets immediately.”
