The government has been accused of “playing the game of the Northern Powerhouse” rather than targeting money at specific problems facing the region’s schools.
Former Conservative Treasury minister Lord O’Neill said it was “misleading” for the government to include money from nationwide initiatives in the £70 million it lists as forming part of its Northern Powerhouse Schools Strategy.
In a letter to the Commons Education Select Committee, he wrote: “On the one hand, this [funding] is, of course, welcome. On the other, however, it is also misleading.”
The peer, who is a vice-chair of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership, added: “My patience has been nearly exhausted by the constant efforts of some to in essence ‘play the game of the Northern Powerhouse’ rather than pursuing anything of substance.”
Referring to a detailed breakdown of the money claimed for the Northern Powerhouse Education Fund, he wrote: “The items of expenditure included in those responses make it clear that the DfE has not created a Northern Powerhouse education fund to support its Northern Powerhouse Schools Strategy.”
He noted that the list included £15.5 million from the England-wide Strategic School Improvement Fund that is being spent in the North.
He wrote: “This raises the question of whether it is, indeed, a new fund or simply a rebranding and reallocation of previously-announced funding.
Improving schools in the North
“Similarly, the inclusion of the ‘northern elements’ of the maths and English hubs expenditure suggests that the announcements of these national policies were simply a reallocation of funding previously announced.”
Lord O’Neill added that while these programmes are “welcome and necessary, it is against the spirit in which the Northern Powerhouse education funding was announced to use it for the Northern elements of national programmes”.
He said that the Northern Powerhouse Education Fund should instead “be used to target the specific issues faced in the North”.
When asked to respond, the Department for Education did not directly address Lord O’Neill’s claim that government claims about funding were “misleading”.
Instead, a spokesperson said: “We are committed to driving up school standards in the North and, the fact is, through the Northern Powerhouse Schools Strategy we are investing £70 million in projects across the region to do just this.
“This includes projects to improve maths and English teaching, support schools that struggle with recruitment and retention and boost children’s language and social skills in the early years - all of which will have a direct impact on families and children in the North of England.”
In a letter to the committee that was written in June but published this week, education secretary Damian Hinds said that as well as focusing on the North, there was a need to “recognise the complex picture of educational performance in different areas of the country”.
He cited data showing “a marked difference in outcomes between London and the rest of the country, with other pockets of low and high performance, rather than a simple North-South divide”.
He wrote that while secondary school pupils in the North performed, on average, worse than those in the South, they were on a par with pupils in the Midlands.
And he said that at key stage 2, the North and the South are at “about the same level” for pupils reaching the expected standard in reading, writing and maths, if London is excluded.
