Devon councillors take education funding campaign to Parliament

Councillors from Devon County Council travelled to London recently as part of a national campaign calling for fairer funding for schools and special educational needs provision.
Councillor Richard Jefferies, the council’s Lead Member for Children’s Services, and Councillor Denise Bickley, Cabinet Member with responsibility for services supporting children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND), joined colleagues from the f40 group of local authorities to lobby government at Westminster.
The f40 group represents 43 of the lowest-funded local authorities in England and is pressing for changes to how education funding is allocated nationally.
Devon schools currently receive just under £5,000 less per mainstream pupil through the Gross Dedicated Schools Grant compared with better-funded areas. SEND funding in Devon is also reported to be around 60 per cent lower than that received by the highest-funded local authorities.
As part of the campaign, councillors are calling on the Government to reform the SEND system to focus on early intervention and inclusion in mainstream education, invest in schools to meet rising demand, and improve the National Funding Formula to ensure funding is distributed more fairly across all councils.
Speaking outside Parliament, Councillor Richard Jefferies said:
"We want to highlight the unfair funding that different areas across the country get for their education.
“Particularly that's the case for Devon where we also have to deal with the challenges around rurality and remoteness.
“We want government to recognise that where lots of services are being delivered elsewhere in the country in areas of high density, those same solutions aren't available for rural areas like Devon.
“Part of that is not recognising that remoteness plays a part in children’s education and wellbeing. Remoteness, it seems, is recognised in the government’s funding formula for adult social care but not for children's social care.
“So, we're asking that question - why the government recognises rurality and remoteness for adult social care, but not for children's education."
Councillor Denise Bickley said funding inequalities were having a direct impact on children and schools across the county. She said:
"It's simply not fair that Devon's children get a lot less funding than counterparts in other authority areas.
“The way the funding formula results in such issues in areas such as the South West leads to inequalities and a system that needs such major improvements, with insufficient funding to right the imbalance.
“If you think about how we have so many small schools in Devon that still have all the same fixed costs, but don't have the pupil numbers to attract sufficient funding, and yet they still need to operate because otherwise we'd have children across the county without access to a school nearby. That's just not fair.
“We are however delighted that ‘inclusion’ is going to be further up the agenda and that Ofsted are going to be focusing on that, which is fantastic.
“However, if we're looking at our mainstream schools becoming more inclusive, they need to have both the resources to be able to change their way of working to make sure they feel welcoming to all children, and educators need to feel empowered to adapt curriculums to suit needs – not force all children to be in education for the ultimate goal of taking GCSEs and the constant assessments leading up to it.
“We need the long-awaited White Paper to deliver. We need a clear steer now coming out of government and some clear finance for it.”
The councillors said they would continue to press ministers to recognise the additional challenges faced by rural areas like Devon and to ensure education funding better reflects the needs of all communities.