I noted that my County Councillor, Fiona Onasanya (Kings Hedges, Labour) didn’t say anything at all during her first county council meeting, and pointed out she didn’t speak during the council’s recent debate on the A14 and infrastructure referenda.

In response to this Cllr Ian Manning tweeted to say Cllr Onasanya had “contributed to the debate on school funding with a thoughtful contribution”.

Cllr Onasanya’s speech is at 1:48:21 of the official audio recording of the morning session of Cambridgeshire County Council’s full council meeting held on the 16th of July 2013. I have transcribed the speech:

Cllr Fiona Onasanya (Kings Hedges, Labour) : Thank you chair, I’d like to start by saying that the introduction of national funding is a national funding formula is a very very good idea. I hope that it would get rid of the historical disparities that have been mentioned however I think that is is important that we look at how this is played out because obviously there is we’re in the time that we’re in now funds would be taken from somewhere and placed somewhere else so we need to look at the mode of how this is going to be panned out. So I do agree that I would be in support of this motion however I do feel that we do need to erm ask more questions and possibly proceed with caution knowing that we need to ensure that there is also some local discretion to deliver this. Thank you.

The text of the Liberal Democrat motion she was expressing support for sought to lobby central government to produce a distribution formula that

• ensures that the basic unit of funding per pupil (i.e. excluding area factors, deprivation, English as an additional language and sparsity) is the same for all pupils across England and is derived from an analysis of what schools are expected to deliver
• distributes funding to Local Authorities rather than to individual schools so that the local Schools Forum, working with partners and the Local Authority, can devise its own local distribution formula to reflect local needs and circumstances
• allocates sufficient Education Services Grant to enable Local Authorities to provide challenge and support for local schools
• provides adequate funding for the commissioning of new schools to meet demographic growth, including not only up-front capital costs but revenue funding for the diseconomies of scale as schools develop
• allocates the Education Services Grant equitably to academies and maintained schools so as to fulfil its own pledge that ‘there will be no financial incentive for schools to convert to academy status’.

The motion was passed unanimously:

Motion calling for fairer funding for Cambridgeshire's schools passes unanimously #cccmtgs

— Chris Havergal (@ChrisHavergalCN) July 16, 2013