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Services for Young People

The beauty of the education funding formula—it is complex and if we tweak one end of it we cause a huge tsunami at the other end—is that it was locally driven. Each local authority looked at its funding formula and had the opportunity to take into account things such as small schools, rural schools and small areas of deprivation. No one, I think, would accept that it is good to take money away from schools in which more than 50% of the kids are on free school meals and share it out among schools in which only 2% or 3% of the children are on free school meals; it does not make sense and it is certainly not what was intended. The scheme was well intentioned, but it is driving money from those schools that have high concentrations of poorer children and moving it to schools with small concentrations. Everything that is happening in youth services and careers services, and everything that has happened with EMA, young people's funding and higher education, where participation from poorer young people from the poorest regions has collapsed in parts of the country because of the tripling of tuition fees—when the Chairman of the Select Committee gave the audience in the Guildhall in York the benefit of the Government's policy on this, it was clear that people had glazed over and were not listening—has a cumulative effect, and it will take a generation to replace and restore services for young people.