A running sore in the Tory party is the way in which school funding is allocated. Under the current arrangements, a school in a rural area receives less money per pupil than one in a town or city, and this causes a great deal of resentment. It means that schools in the best-funded areas get £6,297 per head, but those at the bottom of the list receive just £4,208 per pupil.
Conservative MPs have held repeated meetings with ministers about this arrangement, but got nowhere before the election because the areas they were worried about were more likely to be safer territory for the Tories. They had a particularly grumpy meeting with Nicky Morgan before the election in which this was made clear to them, and which many left in a bit of a huff.
Now that the election business is out of the way, MPs are noticing a greater readiness from ministers to listen to their concerns about the current funding imbalance. The matter has come up at 1922 Committee meetings, and yesterday in a Westminster Hall debate, Sam Gyimah said the government wanted to go further than the £390 million extra funding for those affected by the current arrangements. He also said he couldn’t, as a junior minister, pre-empt the spending review, but this has led Tory MPs campaigning on this matter to feel very confident indeed that they might get somewhere.
The wider context of this debate is that rural Tories felt in the last Parliament that their interests were being ignored, whether it be on fox hunting, NHS funding, or schools funding. David Cameron has already tried – and failed – to hold a vote on relaxing the hunting ban, which many saw as a symbol of a general neglect of rural Conservatives. The schools funding is another longstanding source of grievance for those representing Tory heartlands: one they hope they might be able to resolve with a good while to go before the next election.
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