Given that he has a bit of form with such pledges, Boris Johnson’s promise that he would ensure every secondary school in England would spend £5,000 per pupil per year was bound to raise an eyebrow or two.
The first – and most obvious – question to be raised by the promise made by the frontrunner to replace Theresa May as prime minister is whether the money is there to fund it. The Treasury has been squeezing schools’ spending since 2010 as part of the government’s austerity drive, so would Philip Hammond (no big fan of the former foreign secretary) simply say no?
In reality, that is the wrong question. The precise details of Johnson’s proposal to even up secondary school spending are not entirely clear, but look much more modest than the promise by one of his rivals, Michael Gove, to spend an extra £1bn a year on education.
Under current government plans, secondary schools are supposed to receive at least £4,800 per pupil this year. Analysis by the Schools Week education website suggests that only 35 of 150 local education authorities are on course to spend less than £5,000 per pupil.
It adds that to increase funding to £5,000 for the 755,000 pupils in those areas would cost £48.6m. That is small change in the context of a schools budget that currently stands at £43.5bn – an increase of the order of 0.1%. By comparison, Johnson said in 2016 that Britain leaving the EU would save £350m per week, in one of the most contentious claims of the referendum campaign.
Grammar schools would potentially gain most from the Johnson plan, since they have lower per pupil spending than non-grammar secondary schools.
But even if the promise were acted upon immediately – and no time scale has been announced so far – the financial cost would be minimal. The real question is whether it would make any real difference.
