Information on Loughborough

Loughborough School Funding

Posted on 23/10/2007
Loughborough Newsdesk

nicky morganNicky Morgan, our prospective Conservative MP for Loughborough, has given a warning that school funding are set to be plundered. Local authorities and schools are already expressing their unease at Government tactics to raid school budgets, and deduct 5% of any surplus each and every year for the next three years.

This would mean an estimated £228 million in cash will be grabbed back, an average of £10,000 per school. However the effects of these measures could:

  • punish careful schools across Loughborough that save money,
  • penalise those schools that are saving up to fund a major project, such as a new library,

  • be retrospective, which may be based on the balances in March 2007 onwards, thus hammering schools even if they have expended the surplus since then, and
  • generating a perverse motivation for schools to expend their surpluses by the end of each financial year, damaging long-term planning and potentially encouraging waste.

Nicky said: "Schools in Leicestershire already face very tight budgets because the County is the poorest funded education authority in the country.  Now Gordon Brown has attached an elastic band to that money.  It is unacceptable to force schools to give back money against their will. We should be giving local communities more opportunity and power over their lives, not less, and we need an end to constant state control and meddling from bureacrauts in Whitehall.

News report by T. Robson