Oral question asked in the House of Commons, by Simon Hughes (Liberal Democrat). It was answered by Baroness Smith of Malvern (Labour) on Thursday, 24 November 2005 on behalf of the Department for Education and Skills.

School Finance

Question: If she will revise the funding formula for schools to take greater account of the mobility of school populations.

Answer: In developing our proposals for the new dedicated schools grant, we considered with our partners whether there should be a mobility factor in the distribution of funding for local authorities and decided against it. Of course local authorities can already take account of pupil mobility in their local funding formulae. We will announce in the near future our final decisions on the distribution of the new dedicated schools grants for 2006–07 and 2007–08.

Secondary information