Shropshire schools need better funding, says benefactor
A Shropshire farmer whose family donated £35,000 to its village primary school says the county desperately needs better funding from the Government for education.
Simon Gittins says Shropshire is near the bottom of the league for funding, despite an increase in autumn.
He is calling on MPs and Shropshire Council to campaign for a fairer share of national money.
The Gittins family recently donated the money to Ruyton-XI-Towns Primary School to ensure the school could have smaller classes.
The funding will go on the school's staff budget.
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He said the family business had decided that it would like to do something for the school.
"There have been 22 of my family in the school, my younger daughter has just left while my niece is still there," he said.
He is a former governor at the village school as says that he is acutely aware of the disparity in the funding formula for schools.
"The funding, particularly for rural schools, is very tight and we decided that if we could do this to get the children more teaching time is would be great," he added.
"When I was a governor we had a sister school in an urban area and it had four times the funding per pupil than we did.
"They had problems such as urban deprivation but even so it seemed unfair. Rural areas also face problems, such as transport.
"Rural schools, particularly those in Shropshire, are almost at the bottom of the league table of funding per child from the Government.
"Now we have had the general election I would like to say to our MPs and Shropshire Council that they should stick their shoulder to the wheel and get that funding up, get us a fair share of the funding."
In October is was announced that the primary school amount of funding per child for Shropshire was going up from £4,059 to £4,252.
