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

School Finance

Question: The Minister will know that, in boroughs such as mine, in most of inner London and in much of the rest of the country, people will be extremely unhappy with that answer. Given that some schools have a 60 per cent. turnover in classes in the same year and, in many, a third of the pupils change between the first and second sets of tests, will she look again at what the Prime Minister's strategy unit said only two years ago and at what the Association of London Government report said in June this year, both of which make it clear that a fair funding formula to reflect rapidly changing pupils in classrooms is necessary for equal educational opportunity?

Answer: The hon. Gentleman rightly makes the case that the challenge with respect to pupil mobility rests on the individual schools in which a large proportion of pupils are mobile. That is why it is absolutely right that local authority funding formulae can and should take account of differential funding for schools with high mobility. Given the wide spread of mobility across a range of local authorities, the effect of distributing between authorities on the basis of mobility would have been to flatten and reduce the extra contributions to those authorities with additional educational needs on the basis of deprivation, not to benefit authorities such as the hon. Gentleman's. That is why the decision was taken.

Secondary information