A funding error means that North East schools will be more than £18m worse off than originally forecast next year, Labour says.

The Department for Education (DfE) recently admitted to having bungled its figures on the amount of money that will be given to state schools in England next year. The miscalculation, made because the number of pupils was underestimated, means that schools saw the Government revise a planned 2.7% funding increase per pupil down to 1.9% – a reported difference of £370m.

New analysis released by the Labour Party has found that schools across the North East stand to lose a combined £18.5m from what they had been expecting to receive for their 2024/25 budgets. Bridget Phillipson MP, the shadow education secretary, accused the Government of “staggering mathematical incompetence” and said the error had added to the “enormous” pressure faced by school leaders in the region, following the Covid pandemic and the ongoing crumbling concrete crisis.

The DfE said this was a “misrepresentation” of the situation, as the money had not yet been paid out and would therefore not have to be clawed back from schools. Ms Phillipson told the Local Democracy Reporting Service: “The response from Conservative ministers at the DfE seems to be that this is all fine because it’s for the next academic year. I think that is completely unacceptable.

“It is causing real problems for school leaders across our region and across our country. They are already facing enormous pressure on their budgets and have been through some really tough times with industrial action, with the RAAC crisis in our schools, and with the pandemic as well. It is going to make matters worse at a time when our schools in the region are under lots of pressure already.”

Asked if Labour would restore the £370m to the budget if it were in power, the Houghton and Sunderland South MP would not make a firm commitment. She said: “By the time of the next election, whenever it might come, things may sadly have moved on. It really does depend on when the next election will come.

“What we have set out is that Labour will invest more in our schools by ending the tax breaks that private schools enjoy. We will use that money to put more teachers in our classrooms, better mental health support for children, and a greater focus in the early years around making sure that children arrive at school ready to learn with improved support around speech and language development – which school leaders tell me is a growing problem, with more and more children arriving at school having already fallen behind.”

Following the budget miscalculation, the Government had ordered an inquiry into the mistake. A DfE spokesperson said: “This is a misrepresentation of the update to the national funding formula allocations.

"Schools have not yet received their 2024-25 funding so the correction of this error does not mean adjusting any funding that schools have already received. The Permanent Secretary has taken full responsibility for this error.

"The total amount that the school sector will receive remains unchanged at £59.6 billion in 2024-25, the highest it has ever been in history, in real terms per pupil.”