A PETITION calling on the Government to boost funding for schools in Cambridgeshire is set to be submitted to the Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove.

The petition has been at primary and secondary schools across East Cambridgeshire since the start of the year and has won the backing of hundreds of teachers, parents and pupils.

According to the body behind the petition, the Cambridgeshire Schools Forum (CSF), the county receives only a fraction of the funding that schools in neighbouring counties receive and is the 143rd lowest funded out of 152 authorities.

CSF chairman Philip Hodgson, said: “For a long time Cambridgeshire has received less funding for education than lots of other authorities and, in the last few years, our position has slipped even further.

“Although our schools continue to achieve, we are beginning to see that the funding issue is having an effect.”

Mr Hodgson added that a meeting of Cambridgeshire MPs had been held in recent weeks and that they had all agreed that the situation was unfair to students in the county.

The deadline for the petition closed on Tuesday and it will now be formally collated before being sent off to the Secretary of State in a matter of weeks.

In a letter to parents, Dr Carin Taylor, headteacher at Soham Village College, said: “The present national formula for funding schools is blatantly unfair. If all Cambridgeshire schools were at least to receive the current average funding for local authorities in England, Soham Village College would receive �500,000 more every year than we currently receive.

“We work very hard to make the best possible use of our existing level of funding, and are successful at doing so. But there is no doubt that if we received a fairer share of the funding available to all schools in the country we could do even more to make a difference to every student.”