Surrey County Conservatives

Government funding penalises Surrey’s schools (12th February)

“The birth rate in Surrey is rising sharply and as a result Surrey County Council will have to build anadditional 5,000 Primary School places and 1,000 Secondary School places over the next 4 years. This will require us to find or borrow capital funds of £145m to meet this statutory need” says Peter Martin, Cabinet Member for Children and Learning, at Surrey County Council, who also feels that Surrey should be getting more help from central government to help with investment in school buildings.

“This rising birth rate in Surrey is going to add to the existing pressure on our schools caused by Surrey being a net importer of 2,500 secondary pupils and 1,150 primary pupils from London and surrounding counties. We attract children into the County because of the high quality of our schools.

At the moment there is a system under which it is said that ‘the money follows the child’, but this doesn’t accurately or fairly reflect the reality of the situation. We get revenue funding but not capital funding, so the amount of money we get for school buildings doesn’t accurately reflect the number of children that we educate.

This means that we are unable to invest in extending our schools without borrowing monies that will, of course, have to be paid back at a later date. That, in turn, puts more pressure on the Council’s finances. It would be much fairer for the people of Surrey if the funding system firstly gave us the capital funding to deal with expanding numbers and secondly recognised that over 3,500 of the pupils we educate in Surrey don’t live in the County – that’s a net figure after taking account of those children living in Surrey being educated out of the county”.

Dorothy Ross-Tomlin, Chairman of the Schools & Learning Select Committee, added, “this is a real problem for Surrey County Council and for our residents. We know that a lot of children from Surrey go to schools in Sussex, Hampshire etc… and that we must educate children from outside of Surrey, but Surrey loses out in financial terms because of sheer number of non-Surrey children attending Surrey schools. We don’t mind doing it, but it would be nice if the formula for schools funding reflected reality. We know that because of the rising birth rate we will need to increase the capacity at some schools and that we may even need to build new schools in any case, but the pressures caused by us educating such a large number of non-Surrey children are only serving to make things more complicated. Educating children is very important to us, but we can’t be expected to cover these costs without help from central government. Our residents shouldn’t have to bear this burden by themselves”.