Yesterday, the DfE published the outcome of the review into the Education and Skills Funding Agency led by Sir David Bell plus its response to the review and the resulting changes from 1^st April 2022.

Review of the Education and Skills Funding Agency – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

There are a lot of detailed proposals, but some that struck me of more general interest are these – with the government’s response below the recommendation.

We recommend that further work is done as part of school system reform to create a more strategic and shared understanding of responsibilities between DfE, ESFA, and Ofsted, and that the outcomes of this work are communicated widely

Agreed.

We recommend that the department should have a unified directing voice at a regional level. We have contributed to the current Future DfE project which is bringing together functions in the regional tier, and which will resolve the form and nature of that directing voice

Agreed. Assessing the functions and approach to post-16 regional work will be taken forward as part of developing the Further Education, Higher Education and Employers work set out above and be led by the Director General. We will benefit from learning from the experience of establishing the pre-16 regional tier.

We recommend that, in keeping with our finding that ESFA should focus on funding delivery, the functions in Academies and Maintained Schools Directorate not linked to the funding delivery role, and not required by ESFA’s Accounting Officer to provide assurance, should move to DfE. This means that the non-financial regulatory functions for academies and the functions related to school/trust governance should move to DfE’s pre-16 regional tier, as should new trust and free school activity, UTC engagement, and networking events.

Agreed.

We recommend DfE considers bringing the complaints functions for maintained schools and academies together in a fully centralised complaints system within the department

Agreed.

We recommend that ownership of the Academy Trust Handbook should move to DfE’s School Systems, Academies and Reform Directorate, unless the focus of the Handbook is narrowed back towards a tool for financial management only.

Agreed.

The ESFA had become rather unwieldy over time and these changes will move it back towards its original core function relating to the handling of the financing of the school system.

More interestingly is the re-alignment of the school system with the wider government regional framework. With the levelling up agenda being a cross-department exercise in government, this re-alignment makes sense. However, it doesn’t fit with the boundaries of Headteacher boards and Regional School Commissioners. Could the days of this unelected post be numbered? After all, might there be some cash savings to be made and, if all schools were academies of one sort or another, then one key function would have disappeared.

The DfE still has to work out the 16-18 phase where some students are in the school sector, but more are in the further education sector. There still seems to be room for overlap or avoidance of difficult issues unless the protocol of responsibilities between the directorates is made clear.

One interesting side effect of all schools becoming academies would be the shift in financial year for all schools back to a unified position. However, the financial year would be totally uncoupled from the municipal year, but aligned to the higher education funding rounds.

This review helps sort out the framework for the ‘top’ tier. Now it remains to work out the framework for the middle tier. That will probably be more of a challenge.