§ Mr. John Evansasked the Secretary of State for Education and Science (1) if she will now pay to those metropolitan districts which took over direct grant schools in 1977–78 and 1978–79 the amount of grant which would have been payable to the direct grant school;
(2) which metropolitan district authorities who negotiated the transfer of direct grant schools to voluntary aided schools are, by the freezing of education data for rate support grant, now effectively losing some part of the support which would have been payable out of the education Vote.
§ Miss Margaret JacksonMy right hon. Friend has no power to pay such a grant to local education authorities. Under the Direct Grant Grammar Schools (Cessation of Grant) Regulations 1975 direct grant ceases to be paid to a school when it becomes maintained by a local education authority, at which point it becomes the financial responsibility of the local education authority in the usual way.
To increase the certainty of local authorities about their allocations of rate support grant at the time they set their budgets, it was decided, with the support and agreement of the local authority associations, that the rate support grant distribution for 1978–79 should use final education data for January 1977 rather than provisional data for January 1978, which would have been used under previous practice. This had a number of accepted 63W incidental effects of a minor nature including some loss to the metropolitan districts of Bradford, Manchester, Newcastle, St. Helens, Salford, and Sefton which had direct grant grammar schools moving to voluntary aided status between January 1977 and January 1978. A number of local variables make it difficult to calculate the exact rate support grant loss and there is in any case no direct connection between this and the amount of the Department's former direct grant to the schools in question. The 1979–80 distribution will use January 1978 education data, and so on, for subsequent years.