The Institute for Fiscal Studies and the Nuffield Foundation have published the latest in their series of reports about education spending Annual reports | Institute for Fiscal Studies While the report covers the whole education sector, I am principally interested in the school sector. That sector now overlaps the early years sectors, at the lower age grouping, with many schools taking pupils below the age of five. At the 16-18 age grouping, there is an overlap between the school sector and the further education and skills sector.

The highlights for me from the latest report are: the obvious effect of the explosion of demand for SEND places. I am not sure whether this report fully captures the full cost of the increase, since the transport costs for pupils with SEND aren’t usually a part of the DfE’s budget, and certainly cannot be funded from the Central Services Block or even the High Needs Block of the Dedicated Schools Grant.

The second highlight is the reduced funding for secondary schools. These schools have seen the reduction in 16-18 funding, and a reduction of the gap between their funding and that of primary schools. I suspect the latter, over the long-term, may have been partly affected by the need to fund non-contact time in the primary sector, introduced under the previous Labour government.

The primary sector is now experiencing falling rolls, while the upper secondary 16-18 sector is still seeing pupil numbers growing. As the report says, there is a policy decision to make about falling rolls. Does government either recoup the cash not needed because there are fewer pupils, and put the consequences on schools, or does it keep the cash in the primary sector and hope to improve outcomes? I wouldn’t bet on the latter.

One element missing from the picture seems to me any discussion on the changes in school reserves. I think it is vital to know how much money is being saved by schools from revenue budgets, and whether the total per pupil is increasing or reducing. With many academy trusts ‘pooling’ reserves so funds can be used for a school in a local authority different from that of the school where the cash was accrued, a picture of trends in this area might reveal the extent of short-term pressures on school budgets. Recently, I came across a special school with a balance of £2.5 million. Is that a good use of public money?

In a graph – sadly the IFS don’t number their graphs or tables in the report: an oversight in my opinion – it sees that early years’ spending has doubled between 2010-11 and 2025-26, and primary school spending has increased by 12% over the same period. All school spending was the same per pupil in each year. This means that secondary school spending per pupil declined by three per cent over the period, and 16-18 spending by 8% – this despite the fact that schools often use their most expensive teachers with this age grouping.

Finally, I note that central spending on academies is now £510 per pupil, double the level in 2016-17. I am not convinced that this is due to a shift towards larger MATs as the report states, as this would imply there were no economies of scale possible.

 I will review this issue further when I look in detail at the 202425 accounts of a selection of MATs once all their accounts are published.