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Education and Inspections Bill

One of the problems with the way in which the Government run education is that they do not give councils an awful lot of freedom about the kinds of schools that they want to offer in a particular area, so that they are forced down a route, either through bribery or financial incentive, and often through the building schools for the future programme. If the Government really want to turn round underachievement and social segregation in schools, they need to look again at the way in which schools are funded. If a means could be devised to target specific funding at young people who are underachieving or disadvantaged, schools would have an incentive to take those young people and they would get the extra resources that they need to thrive. By that I mean not just targeting a local authority or a school but following the pupil. We are looking at how such a system could be implemented in practice. A similar model has been used in the Netherlands and in Finland with considerable success, and I hope that the Government will look in more detail at such methods.