Shadow education secretary Angela Rayner says budget boost for selective education will do nothing to help deprived children

Investing £500m in new grammar schools is a “vanity project” that ignores real-terms cuts to struggling schools’ budgets, Labour’s education spokeswoman has said.

In Wednesday’s budget, Philip Hammond is expected to announce he will spend £320m on expanding the government’s free school programme, creating 70,000 places in 140 schools, which will be able to offer selective education after legislation is passed.



Free public transport for the poorest children to grammar schools, covering those within two to 15 miles of their homes, will also be offered.

Angela Rayner, the shadow education secretary, said the funds were not being invested where they were most needed. “The money is being spent on a vanity project with no evidence it will help children move on from socially deprived backgrounds. I think it’s disgusting,” she told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Tuesday.

The chancellor insisted that the core schools budget – which stands at more than £40bn a year – would be protected and that the policy would help ensure children could access quality education whatever their background.

However, Labour argues that the schools budget, although protected in real terms, does not provide for funding per pupil to increase in line with inflation, equalling a real-terms reduction in the funds spent for every school child.

The National Audit Office said in December 2016 that the government was only offering flat cash funding per pupil over the five years to 2019-20, meaning that mainstream schools needed to find significant savings, amounting to £3bn. “Schools have not experienced this level of reduction in spending power since the mid-1990s,” the NAO report said.

“It is not about giving places to local children that need schools, it’s about sucking money out of the state sector, which has already seen a £3bn cut and putting it into a system [with] no evidence to suggest it will help our children,” Rayner said. “It is not parents who choose, these schools select the pupils. It will make the education system worse for most of the children in our system.”

In the budget, £216m will be invested to help rebuild and refurbish existing schools, which the Treasury said would be in addition to £10bn to be spent on the condition of schools.

Almost 2 million more pupils are being taught in good or outstanding schools – 89% of the total – than in 2010, but more than 1 million are in underperforming institutions.

While not all the new schools will choose to become grammars, officials made clear that the new money was to support key proposals in the green paper, called Schools that Work for Everyone, of expanding selective education.

Dr Mary Bousted, general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, said teachers and heads would be dismayed to see Hammond throwing money at free schools and grammar schools when others were facing big real-terms funding cuts.

“These spending pledges are totally insufficient to tackle the funding crisis the government is inflicting on schools by forcing them to make over £3bn of savings by 2020,” she said. “Bigger class sizes, fewer learning resources and fewer teachers with greater workloads are the likely consequences.”

Bousted argued that “funding the expansion of selective education is a mistake that will result in a small minority benefitting at the expense of the vast majority of the country’s young people”.

Theresa May has insisted that the proposals will guarantee more choice for parents. “For too many children, a good school place remains out of reach, with their options determined by where they live or how much money their parents have,” she said. “Over the last six years, we have overseen a revolution in our schools system and we have raised standards and opportunity, but there is much more to do.”

The prime minister’s spokesman said the additional £500m funding would not come at a cost to existing schools. “Nobody is losing out here, this is a new pot of money, but we would also wish to point out that school funding is at its highest ever level, £40bn this year,” he said. “There is a consultation on the schools funding formula and we will respond to that in due course. This is about making funding fairer.”

