Wandsworth Labour has launched a petition calling on Education Secretary Justine Greening to stop "almost £16m taken from schools in the borough".

MP for Tooting Rosena Allin-Khan: "These planned cuts come at the same time that costs are rising in our local schools.

"Head teachers are reporting that they are increasingly faced with difficult choices such as whether they can afford to have classrooms cleaned, or to retain support staff who are essential to school communities".

She added: "Without adequate funding, the Government will be failing our schools and failing our children as they miss out on the excellent education they all deserve".

In response to the petition, Justine Greening said: "Schools in Wandsworth are benefitting from record levels of funding, and more importantly they are delivering an excellent education for local children.

"The fact is under Labour we wouldn’t see more spending on schools, we’d just seen more money spent on debt interest."

Both Wandsworth Conservatives and Wandsworth Labour have put forward different figures, with Labour using the NUT’s projections, resulting in the Tories labelling the group a "trade-union funded pressure group".

Wandsworth Conservatives has used the Government’s much more modest predictions- a proposed reduction of 1.84 which equals £2.6m.

Labour predicts schools in Wandsworth are set to lose £15,612,273 by 2020, as a result of the Government’s Fairer Funding Formula.

The Tories say half of secondary schools will get more money under this formula, worth on average an extra £110k a year each.

One of the issues with the formula is that although more money will be given to schools who do not get an equal share, funding will be taken away from larger schools with more pupils that need it more.

Regardless of whether either side agree on the figures, both agree the cuts are not a positive step with the council’s cabinet member for children’s services Councillor Kathy Tracey saying "clearly any reduction in funding is regrettable".

Ms Greening was confronted by a group of about 20 Conservative MPs at a private meeting last night (March 15) complaining about the lack of spending.

There has been a huge backlash to the cuts as many schools are already struggling; hundreds of head teachers have written to the Education Secretary to reverse the cuts.

The Local Government Association (LGA) fears councils will be unable to meet their legal obligations such as checking staff for criminal records due to the cuts.

Councils are legally obliged to provide school services such as mental health support, fire safety and the maintenance of school buildings.

Chairman of the LGA’s children and young people board, Richard Watts, said councils "have their hands tied".

He said: "They are legally obliged to provide these services but will have no money to do so unless the school is prepared to pay for it from its own pocket."

He added: "If councils are to continue to provide these vital services, the £600 million proposed cut to the Education Services Grant needs to be reversed."

In response, a Department for Education spokesman said: "The Government has protected the core schools budget in real terms since 2010, with school funding at its highest level on record at more than £40bn in 2016-17 - and that is set to rise, as pupil numbers rise, over the next two years to £42bn by 2019-20.

"But the system for distributing that funding across the country is unfair, opaque and outdated. We are going to end the historic post code lottery in school funding and under the proposed national schools funding formula, more than half of England’s schools will receive a cash boost."

The Government is consulting on school funding until March 22.