I’M sure you recall the political slogan ‘education, education, education’, and who said it.
Perhaps a more appropriate catchphrase should have been, ‘fairer funding, fairer funding, fairer funding’.
For a long time now Dorset has languished near the bottom of the funding table.
We are a member of the F40 Group, a politically neutral organisation representing the 37 lowest funded education authorities in the country.
It, along with MPs, has been lobbying the Department for Education hard for a fairer funding formula.
Currently, for example, each child at Wey Valley School now attracts a per pupil premium of £4,908, compared with £5,443 for pupils at Gloucestershire Academy and £8,256 for those in Tower Hamlets.
The situation gets worse every year due to successive, unfair settlements, based upon historical arrangements.
It’s the same for both primary and secondary education.
And, put simply, it means that children with the same needs receive very different levels of support, based only upon where they live.
This cannot be right.
Neither does the situation where children from the same family at different schools, separated by a funding boundary, receive wildly differing subsidies.
Nor does it account for ‘sparsity’, where the lack of pupils in rural areas like ours, means that schools with tiny intakes are unviable.
Overall, average funding per pupil in the top 10 areas of the country is £6,300, while the bottom 10 receive just £4,200.
Constant lobbying has seen an extra £390 million allocated to the poorest funded authorities for 2015-16, but its distribution was flawed, according to F40.
We have a fight on our hands, but one I believe we can win.
For the sake of all our children, I hope so.