School funding should no longer be judged on a per-pupil basis because of falling birth rates and pupil numbers, a former education secretary has said. Conservative MP Damian Hinds said the decline in the number of children in primary and secondary schools meant funding being measured on a per-pupil basis was no longer a good reflection of whether funding is increasing or decreasing.
Mr Hinds said: “Things are changing very significantly now in schools because of demographic change, and we have reached a point where I do not believe it is legitimate to use the measure of real terms per pupil as the yardstick for whether effective school resourcing is increasing or decreasing, and that is because the number of pupils is going to fall.
“We know already from the Times Educational Supplement that surplus secondary places have increased by some 50% in just two years. Now Labour MPs may well argue this, and I hope they do, and they will say ‘obviously when you’ve got a smaller number of children there’s going to be less funding’, and there is of course some logic to that argument.
“But in a sense, it doesn’t really matter what arguments Labour MPs make in this chamber, because back in their constituencies talking to head teachers they will hear something different. When pupil numbers are rising, if you hold real-terms per-pupil funding constant, that is a net increase in resourcing to the school.
“When they’re falling, even if you increase real terms per pupil by a few percent that feels very much like a cut.” He used the analogy of a school class falling by two pupils from 29 to 27, it being equivalent to about £10,000 less in funding.
“The vast majority of your costs don’t change,” Mr Hinds said. “You’re still paying the teacher the same, and so on.” The problem comes amid falling birth rates in recent years, which have hit primary schools.
The issue has been acutely faced in parts of the capital, where high living costs have exacerbated the issue. Meanwhile secondary school pupils born during the late 2000s and early 2010s baby boom will move out of the system in the coming years.
Mr Hinds said schools in urban areas had already closed, with others on the horizon. He said some could convert into nursery schools, or special schools.
Some larger schools have reduced the number of entries into each year. Primary schools in parts of London have shut in recent years due to falling pupil numbers.
Camden, which includes Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s Holborn and St Pancras constituency, has seen the shutting of schools while a secondary school has reduced the number of pupils it expects to take in each year. Earlier this month data from the Government showed pupil rolls in England had fallen for the first time in more than a decade.
Primary pupil numbers have been falling for several years; however, they have been balanced out by secondary school pupils born in the baby boom in the late 2000s and early 2010s. Other figures from the Department for Education (DfE) reported there were 611,000 unfilled primary places for 2023-2024, a 5.8% increase on the year before.
Mr Hinds told the House of Commons that the problem could be felt just as sharply outside of towns and cities, saying: “In a rural primary school neither of those things is an option. You have major, major indivisibilities.
“And right now, 92% of DfE funding for schools is driven by pupil numbers, and I just don’t think that is going to work over the years ahead. So I ask ministers, what are you going to do to reform funding, so it is fair and effective at a time of falling overall pupil numbers.”
Responding to the estimates day debate, education minister Catherine McKinnell said: “This Government has – as Labour governments always do – prioritised education with the department’s budget for day-to-day cash spending, increasing by almost £6 billion compared to last financial year, and within that, we have increased the overall core schools budget by £3.7 billion in 2025/26 compared to last year.
“This real-terms per-pupil increase in funding helps to underpin our ambition of achieving high and rising standards for all children in all of our schools.”
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