School funding 'not a North-South issue'

Charles Clarke says he has had complaints from all over

The government is denying that Southern England has lost out to the North in this year's school funding allocation.

The Education Secretary, Charles Clarke, said he was getting complaints about budget shortfalls from head teachers in the East Riding of Yorkshire, for instance.

In the Commons, the Tory leader, Iain Duncan Smith, taunted the prime minister with the words of one of his own advisers, complaining about the cash shortage in the school where she is a governor.

Speaking earlier to reporters, Mr Clarke repeated his claim that some local education authorities have not yet passed on to schools all the money they should have done - saying some were holding back as much as 5%.

The breakdown that he planned to publish on Friday would show "striking" variations across England, he said.

He has deliberately not published it yet because of the local elections on Thursday - but Mr Clarke said school funding was not a big issue in the campaign.

He has denied that his officials were behind an apparent leak of the list to a newspaper - denounced by the Tories as "shameless electioneering".

New arrangement 'issue'

There have been widespread and repeated complaints from education unions and individual head teachers over recent weeks that budget shortfalls - when they had expected a big increase - would mean redundancies in schools.

The government insists it is putting £27.8bn into education this year, £2.7bn more than in 2002-3.

"It's not just the South," said Mr Clarke.

"It's true that the issue of the new local government arrangement, and its alleged advantage for urban councils, is an issue."

So to allow for the changes caused by the new formula for distributing money this year, the government had set a "floor" of a minimum increase of 3.2%.

Schools should have £250m on top of the extra they needed to cover increases in teachers' salaries and employers' pensions and National Insurance contributions.

Openness

"I was quite struck by the variety there was right across the board. We have some holding back, three, four, 5%," said Mr Clarke.

He added: "We don't say the decisions are wrong, they may be perfectly legitimate decisions.

Damian Green accuses ministers of trying to pass the buck

"My only argument is that they should be very open about it.

"If there are schools which have got funding crises which could lead to teacher redundancies, the LEA should be trying to sort that out rather than keeping it at the centre."

A report in The Times newspaper said that on a "provisional" list of the 10 councils that Mr Clarke would name on Friday, eight were Tory-run.

The shadow education secretary, Damian Green, said: "This government leak is a transparent political ploy and a cynical piece of buck-passing.

'Shameless'

"There is an alternative list of 10 Labour councils where schools are suffering including councils like Durham - where the prime minister's constituency is - and Gateshead - where Schools Minister David Miliband's constituency is.

"Instead the government is indulging in some shameless electioneering by trying to pin the blame on Conservative councils that have been starved of cash by Labour."

He said the government should come clean and admit that its own incompetence was why "thousands of teachers are threatened with redundancy".

The Department for Education has denied being behind any leak and says the list "in no way represents" its list but was based on a survey by the paper itself.

But Mr Green says in a letter to the head of the Civil Service that the government's announcement that it planned to publish a "clearly sensitive" list in itself breached election guidelines.

Labour 'waste'

During prime minister's questions in the Commons, Tony Blair acknowledged there were funding problems with particular schools in particular areas but said that, overall, funding had increased by 12% since 1997.

The Conservative leader, Iain Duncan Smith, said teaching posts were being cut while the number of "bureaucrats" at the Department for Education had risen by 25%.

He said this was evidence that "Labour taxes more, wastes more and delivers less."

Even a Downing Street adviser had warned that poorer children stood to lose most from the problems to which Mr Blair had admitted.

This was a reference to Fiona Millar, who is the partner of Downing Street director of communications, Alastair Campbell.

In her capacity as a primary school chair of governors, Ms Millar wrote to parents about concerns over pressures on funding this year, saying they could threaten staffing levels.