SPENDING on the school infrastructure budget under the Tories will have fallen by £3.5 billion by the end of the current financial year, Labour has warned in the run-up to next week’s Budget announcement.

Capital expenditure on education will be down 41.2 per cent in real terms at the end of next March compared to 2010, when the Conservatives came to power, according to Labour’s analysis of data from the Institute for Fiscal Studies’ Green Budget 2018.

Spending on school buildings – of which 60 per cent were built before 1976, according to government statistics – stood at £8.8bn in 2010, but the figure will have dropped to £5.2bn by the end of 2018-19.

Labour pointed to a BBC report from July that featured King’s Church of England school in Wolverhampton, which had 300 unrepaired holes in its roof and 14 fewer staff members because of budget cuts.

Shadow education secretary Angela Rayner said: “It is simply not acceptable that thousands of our children are learning in schools and classrooms that are leaking and crumbling around them.”
  
She is demanding that the Budget, to be announced on Monday by Chancellor Philip Hammond, includes £1bn to stop further cuts to per pupil funding for schools, £250 million to meet his own party’s commitments on teachers’ pay and £1.7bn to reverse cuts made since 2015.

More than £3bn is needed to reverse cuts to further and adult education since 2010, and more than £1bn to reverse cuts to Sure Start centres for new parents, Ms Rayner added.

Lamiat Sabin is the Morning Star’s Parliamentary Reporter.