Tag Archives: funding

Funding formula delay?

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The DfE have written to the Chair of the Education Select Committee saying that they are not now in a position to comment on the development of a new national Funding formula when the Minister appears in front of the Committee next week. The reason given is that there were over 6,000 responses to the first stage consultation and officials haven’t finished analysing them yet. Ho hum, so what were they all doing during the period of purdah?

The response for the chairman of the Committee reflected anxiety that the timetable for introduction may now slip, even if there isn’t a general election in the autumn. After all, any changes for 2017 that affected maintained schools would need to be approved by Schools Forums across the county in the autumn term, ready for introduction in April. Such a timetable is looking unrealistic now and impossible if it needs the approval of a new Prime Minister if one isn’t in post until September and even then such a timetable assumes that the current ministerial team remain in place.

However, even more urgent, is the publication of the 26th STRB Report and the DfE’s response that has now taken over two months to formulate since they received the report at the end of April. Schools need to know how much they will have to pay staff from September. Even where schools have freedom to pay what they like, the churn that could result from some schools, with more cash, paying more than others won’t help create the stability that the system needs at the present time.

The government’s whole education strategy as outlined in the March White Paper now looks as it could suffer the same fate as the contents of Mrs Thatcher’s famous White Paper, ‘Education: framework for expansion’ that was scuppered by the economic crisis of 1973 onwards. It is not clear whether or not there will be an economic crisis now, but a political one there certainly is across both of the two traditional ruling parties.

Whether the news of the easing of the fiscal rules so as not to need to eradicate the deficit by the end of this parliament will be good news for education it is too early to say. However, if capital projects get the nod for expansion, school buildings have the advantage that they can be built in any part of the country. Even where pupil numbers aren’t increasing as fast as in the south of England, there are always old buildings to replace. After all, it was in 1969 that a Labour government first announced a plan to re-build all pre-1906 schools. A revival of such an idea in order to help unemployed builders in the regions might go down better than, say, pushing ahead with HST2, however desirable that project is in the long-run.

Unless there are a rush of announcements over the next few weeks, schools will start their summer break facing an unprecedented level of uncertainty. Not a good place to be.

 

Purdah causes more issues for education sector

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The Report of the STRB doesn’t seem like the only activity at the DfE caught by the start of the purdah period for the Euro Referendum. I had been expecting the second stage of the consultation over the proposed new National Funding Formula to appear last week: it didn’t. ASCL’s interim general secretary commented in a press notice that ‘The timetable for the new funding formula was already very tight and this delay is the straw that breaks the camel’s back.’

The delay will affect everyone, since a three month consultation launched at the end of June will run to the end of September. Even allowing for a month for the DfE to respond to any consultation, even to say, having read the responses we aren’t taking any notice, it would be late October before action could be taken. That doesn’t leave much time for School Forum to respond and set any limits left to them to administer before the 2017 financial year starts in April. Of course an eight week consultation over the summer holidays and every decision controlled by the DfE might still allow a 2017 start, but it only needs some intervention either through the Administrative Court by way of judicial review from a school that loses out under the proposals or in the House of Commons for the timetable to be derailed.

There are also tenders, such as that for the next stage of the National Teaching Service that seem to have fallen foul of purdah. The delay shouldn’t affect the timetable for a 2017 start, but will reduce the planning time available for the successful bidder.

However, the DfE were able to publish the Wood Report and their observations on it before purdah started. The report suggests significant changes to the manner in which local authorities, the police and NHS, plus the departments at Westminster than oversee these bodies and fund them, will handle serious case reviews. This is another area where the lack of any logical framework for local government is causing problems. On the one hand the government want to re-introduce large urban counties under the guise of the Northern Powerhouse while seemingly sanctioning the continuation of small unitary authorities, such as those that govern the former Berkshire.

In respect of children’s services, there doesn’t yet seem to be a coherent framework that binds together local and regional requirements. Nationally, the arrangements between the Home Office (police) DfE (Children’s Services) Department of Health (NHS) and DCLG (funding of local authorities) seems even more tenuous that the local frameworks in the emerging MASH arrangements  – Multi Agency Safeguarding Hubs – being put together in the more forward thinking areas. The lack of common boundaries between services in many localities probably doesn’t help. In education, the overall role of local authorities is sometimes hampered by the presence of large numbers of academies, especially in the secondary sector, where the handling of issues, such as missing episodes by pupils, may reflect the strength of the relationship between individual academies, their MATs whose headquarters may deal with lots of different local authorities and police bodies, and the MASH, if there is one.

Safeguarding children is rightly top of the agenda but whether managing from the DfE remains the correct approach is not considered within the Wood Report. There might be a case, either for a Ministry for Children, and not just a Minister or shifting responsibility to the Ministry of Justice to sit alongside the Tribunal Service.

Strikes in Kent?

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Who would have though staff in grammar schools would consider strike action? After events in Lincolnshire earlier this year, it is now apparently the turn of grammar schools in Kent to discover that teachers can talk of strike action. According to the Kentnews.co.uk website http://www.kentnews.co.uk/news/strike_plans_at_three_grammar_schools_including_cranbrook_school_1_4543745 as many as three grammar schools in the county have staff considering industrial action. There seem to be two distinct issues; academy status and sixth form funding. The first issue is one all schools face, and it is difficult to see how staff at any one school can do anything more than delay the inevitable if the government still really wants a school system comprised entirely of academies. I suppose they could resign on-mass and take their skills elsewhere, perhaps into a free school working closely with the County Council.

The issue of sixth form funding is an important one for grammar schools, as it is for any school with a large sixth form. If the whole of Year 11 already transfer to the sixth form then there is little opportunity to increase the size of the sixth form except by attracting pupils from other schools, possibly to their detriment. At present, although pupil numbers are rising rapidly among the younger age groups, numbers are still falling among the oldest age groups in schools putting pressure on income from this age group.

Smaller numbers, plus a savage cut in the unit of funding, doesn’t make for a happy environment. School leaders have had to remove uneconomic subjects and increase group sizes with the resulting larger workloads in marking for teachers. And ‘A’ level marking has never been just a matter of ticking boxes. Thus, even where there is a teacher shortage nationally, there are tales of redundancies as a result of the pressure on the unit of funding alongside the increase in National Insurance and pension contributions.

Grammar schools generally don’t have many pupils with either an SEN background of eligible for free school meals. They might want to ponder whether working with local primary schools could help attract more pupils with these backgrounds that also bring more cash than other pupils. Perhaps a ‘fostering for grammar’ campaign in Kent might help more children in care enter selective schools. In Kent, there is also the un-accompanied young asylum seekers group of young people. In my experience many that take this perilous route are keen to achieve. Grammar Schools might want to see whether a first steps course for such individuals could pay dividends.

Essentially, in this market-driven world of education, being business minded can help overcome government policies that adversely affect a school. The alternative is just to implement the cuts and face the consequences.

Of course, in the past, collaboration between schools helped save minority subjects and allowed a broader curriculum to be available. When I was a sixth former, more years ago than I care to recall, the local girls’ school didn’t offer Chemistry at ‘A’ level and those that wanted to study it came to our school. Such collaboration needs a system working for the benefits of all, not the satisfaction of some.

 

W(h)ither UTCs?

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This month the Education Funding Agency has issued financial notices to improve to two University Technical Colleges; Daventry and Buckinghamshire. Interestingly, both are cited in a recent House of Commons Library briefing paper on UTCs (No 07250 issued 15th March 2016) as having relatively low recruitment figures in their early years of operation. Indeed, Daventry, according to the local newspaper, is currently considering moving from its current 14-18 UTC model to become an 11-18 school, presumably to boost numbers and help with school places in the area.  Nationally, three of the first 41 UTCs have either closed or are in the process of doing so, as are also some of the other 14-18 Studio Schools. However, a further 20 UTCs are in the planning stage.

So, might UTCs be set to become the ‘De Lorean’ of the education world; a good idea, but not financially viable? Having visited the Didcot UTC recently, I can see the attraction of the concept as supported by Lord Baker. But, they do run into a number of challenges. Firstly, changing school at 14 isn’t a normal part of the school scene, so the UTCs have to persuade young people and their parents that the change is worthwhile. Secondly, the schools that they are departing from will lose cash for every pupil that transfers. After four years a school losing ten pupils a year could be £200,000 down on income, but still be trying to offer the same curriculum to its remaining pupils. Lose twenty pupils a year and the cash burn is even more concerning. Some schools might fight to keep their pupils or only be interested in losing those that cost more to educate than they generate in revenue.

As each UTC has its own brand, there isn’t even a coherent national offering and some UTCs may look more attractive to pupils with an interest in vocational courses rather than academic prowess. This raises the question as to whether or not these pupils could have been more cost effectively educated by the further education sector. Certainly, a school that gains a reputation for only educating part of the ability range is less likely to flourish, especially if that part is the less able group. UTCs are also probably not helped, especially in rural areas, by the fact that there is no support with transport costs unless the UTC is able to provide assistance. This isn’t an issue in London, where TfL provides free transport for all school pupils, but it is in the rest of the country where the cost of attending a UTC may run into several hundred pounds a year compared with staying put at the school you joined at eleven.

The government will need to work out how to make UTCs a success if they want the concept to flourish in the manner that Lord Baker intended. This will be a challenge while the government continues to believe in the market approach to education. Funding these schools differently to other schools would result in cries of ‘foul’ from the school losing pupils at 14, but as we have seen with Daventry and Buckinghamshire, the risk of not doing so is that the UTCs will struggle to maintain financial solvency, especially as they are operating in areas of the curriculum with above average teaching costs in both revenue and capital terms compared with say an arts based curriculum.  ln a school offering the full curriculum, expensive subjects can be balanced with less costly ones. Alternatively, if you are a free school, you can opt only for a cheap languages and arts subject curriculum and eschew the expensive science and technology areas, however useful they might be to the national economy.

Unless there is a real desire by government to make the UTC idea work for the 14-18 age group the concept seems potentially at risk of becoming like Lord Baker’s earlier foray into this area, City Technology Colleges, doomed to be little more than a sideshow in the educational fairground.

Education in the budget

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Never mind what the Chancellor said, pasted below is what the Treasury are really saying about education in the budget.

Here are my thoughts:

How will the 10% of schools that could gain under the National Funding Formula, but won’t receive the full amount, be identified?

Where is the funding for the extra pupils to come from? Some 700,000 extra pupils at £4,000 would generate a need for 32.8 billion extra funding by early in the next parliament. There isn’t anything about this in the budget.

This sort of basic need funding makes the extra money from the sugar tax look less than generous, even if it is a job creation scheme funded by the drinks industry for art, PE and drama teachers. I also note that while the figure for primary schools is clear; an extra £160 million per year, the figure for secondary of £285 million is only expressed as ‘up to’ – so no guarantee there.

If all 1,600 schools take up the £10 million for breakfast clubs they will receive £32.89 per day based upon a 190 day school-year. Helpful, but not a huge amount.

What happens as the industry cuts out sugar and reduces the amount the levy will raise isn’t, of course, clear.

Interestingly, there was no comment on the costs associated with the big gamble to make all schools academies. This isn’t a cost free exercise, as one of my earlier posts has shown.

The 2016 budget

Education

1.89 This Budget accelerates the government’s schools reforms and takes steps to create a gold standard education throughout England. The government will:

  • drive forward the radical devolution of power to school leaders, expecting all schools to become academies by 2020, or to have an academy order in place to convert by 2022. The academies programme is transforming education for thousands of pupils, helping to turn around struggling schools while offering our best schools the freedom to excel even further
  • accelerate the move to fairer funding for schools. The arbitrary and unfair system for allocating school funding will be replaced by the first National Funding Formula for schools from 2017-18. Subject to consultation, the government’s aim is for 90% of schools who gain additional funding to receive the full amount they are due by 2020. To enable this the government will provide around £500 million of additional core funding to schools over the course of this Spending Review, on top of the commitment to maintain per pupil funding in cash terms. The government will retain a minimum funding guarantee
  • ask Professor Sir Adrian Smith to review the case for how to improve the study of maths from 16 to 18, to ensure the future workforce is skilled and competitive, including looking at the case and feasibility for more or all students continuing to study maths to 18, in the longer-term. The review will report during 2016
  • invest £20 million a year of new funding in a Northern Powerhouse Schools Strategy. This new funding will ensure rapid action is taken to tackle the unacceptable divides that have seen educational progress in some parts of the North lag behind the rest of the country. In support of this, Sir Nick Weller will lead a report into transforming education across the Northern Powerhouse

Soft drinks industry levy to pay for school sport

1.90 Childhood obesity is a national problem.

The UK currently has one of the highest overall obesity rates amongst developed countries In England 1 in 10 children are obese when they start primary school, and this rises to 2 in 10 by the time they leave.

1.91 The evidence shows that 80% of children who are obese between the ages of 10 and 14 will go on to become obese adults, and this has widespread costs to society, including through lost productivity and the direct costs of treating obesity-related illness. The estimated cost to the UK economy today from obesity is approximately £27 billion, with the NHS currently spending over £5 billion on obesity-related costs.

1.92 Sugar consumption is a major factor in childhood obesity, and sugar-sweetened soft drinks are now the single biggest source of dietary sugar for children and teenagers. A single 330ml can of cola can contain more than a child’s daily recommended intake of added sugar. Public health experts have identified sugar-sweetened soft drinks of this kind as a major factor in the prevalence of childhood obesity.

1.93 Budget 2016 announces a new soft drinks industry levy targeted at producers and importers of soft drinks that contain added sugar. The levy will be designed to encourage companies to reformulate by reducing the amount of added sugar in the drinks they sell, moving consumers towards lower sugar alternatives, and reducing portion sizes.

1.94 Under this levy, if producers change their behaviour, they will pay less tax. The levy is expected to raise £520 million in the first year. The OBR expect that this number will fall over time as the total consumption of soft drinks in scope of the levy drops, in part as a result of producers changing their behaviour and helping consumers to make healthier choices.

1.95 In England, revenue from the soft drinks industry levy over the scorecard period will be used to:

  • double the primary school PE and sport premium from £160 million per year to £320 million per year from September 2017 to help schools support healthier, more active lifestyles. This funding will enable primary schools to make further improvements to the quality and breadth of PE and sport they offer, such as by introducing new activities and after school clubs and making greater use of coaches
  • provide up to £285 million a year to give 25% of secondary schools increased opportunity to extend their school day to offer a wider range of activities for pupils, including more sport
  • provide £10 million funding a year to expand breakfast clubs in up to 1,600 schools starting from September 2017, to ensure more children have a nutritious breakfast as a healthy start to their school day

There are also some regional developments associated with the northern Powerhouse developments.

Finally, Gordon Brown meddled in education as Chancellor; one result was the 2002 staffing crisis after schools were handed cash, but the extra teachers they tried to recruit with the money hadn’t been trained. Will this Chancellor fare better with his announcements on academies and will Tory backbenchers go along with making their local primary schools all academies?

Funding and equality

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In the good old days Cabinet office guidelines recommended 13 weeks for a public consultation by a government department. The stage one consultation on the ‘Schools national funding formula’ was published on the 7th March and closes on the 17th April. This is but five weeks including Easter. The closing day is a Sunday. (There might have been an exclamation mark here, but I am trying to conform to the new DfE guidelines).

The interesting feature for me of the proposals centres on the attempt by the government to marry together two different notions of equality. The first of these is the notion that everyone should have the same funding. In essence it is the argument of the F40 Group of authorities that felt they were short-changed when the current rules were introduced. The second notion is that of equal outcomes. If every child is to achieve the maximum possible from their education some will need more resources than others. This principle has long been accepted in relation to SEN and with the Pupil Premium the issue of the need for other forms of additional support was formalised at a national rate. The Pupil Premium will remain for the lifetime of this parliament, but no guarantee has been given for after 2020. The consultation identifies three categories of additional needs.

Without fully worked examples, it is difficult to do more than comment on the building blocks of the new formula. I suspect the one that will worry schools that might be potential losers under a new formula is the area cost adjustment. The level this is set at will need to be able to compensate for areas where salaries are higher because of high cost of living and working in the area. However, if it doesn’t recognise the high cost of housing in some areas outside London, it won’t help schools in those areas attract and retain staff. This is important because, as the consultation recognises, staffing costs are the major part of any school’s budget. Ever since the introduction of Local Management of Schools in the early 1990s, the decision to fund on ‘average salaries’ rather than actual salary bills has benefitted schools with a relatively young staff profile and eaten up more of the budget of those schools with a high proportion of staff at the top of the Upper Pay Band. The new formula won’t change that. Indeed, it might see the end of scales and move towards a single point or a first year starting salary and then the same basic salary for all with additions for responsibilities and other reasons depending on what the school could afford.

The notion of support for exceptional circumstance such as split sites, sparsity and business rates, not to mention the PfI payments from the Building Schools for the Future programme, is welcome news, assuming the funding is enough to cover all current needs.

And here lies the issue. With more pupils to educate, how much more cash will there be in real terms? Personally, I would also want to see modelling of outcomes when the current pupil numbers currently going through primary schools move into the secondary sector. What will be the effects on primary schools, especially small primary schools, when secondary numbers are rising and primary numbers are static or again falling? The nature of the formula will especially affect small rural primary schools. Does a Conservative government want to design a formula that might lead to their wholesale closure or will the sparsity factor balance off against the area cost adjustment? This will, I am sure, worry some of the more rural areas of England, not least Northumberland where, according to the DfE website, Holy Island Church of England First School currently has a per pupil expenditure or more than £27,000. I am not sure whether the statutory walking distance to the nearest schools works in cases like that but it might be another factor to add to the list of exceptions that can be covered through additional funding.

This just goes to show how much work DfE officials have done on trying to create a fair formula, but how complex the issue remains until there is agreement on what a fair formula is. What it isn’t is just allocating the same amount to every pupil.

 

Larger class for London schools

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I guess the Chancellor wanted some good news to announce ahead of his Autumn Statement this week where the accepted mood music is of a round of cuts to department’s budgets. Is that the reason he leaked a reminder of the review of school funding and the creation of a national funding formula for schools to the BBC yesterday.

This news no doubt helps keep the f40 Group of largely Conservative shire counties happy and hopefully distracts them from the fact that they won’t benefit as much from the council tax increase allowed this year to pay for growing social care budgets as unitary authorities and London boroughs will because their council tax is split with district councils.

There didn’t seem to be anything radically new in the Chancellor’s announcement on school funding, but it is interesting to speculate how Zac Goldsmith, the Tory candidate for London mayor, reacted to the news. As the BBC report noted, London boroughs will be the main losers in any redistribution of cash to schools, assuming there is insufficient cash to allow everyone to be a winner, as might have been the case if Labour had grasped this nettle before the 2008 recession. Will Conservative voters in the capital accept the news with equanimity or, like most losers in these situations, feel hard done by?

Now I suppose that the Chancellor is gambling that part of any loss through the change in the formula that will adversely affect London, where the funding per pupil is greatest, will be mitigated by the increase in pupil numbers which will bring more cash overall, if less per pupil.

A 100 pupils bringing £5,000 each generates half a million pounds for a school. If that was reduced to £4,500 the school would need to recruit 111 pupils to generate roughly the same amount. This would inevitably mean larger classes. While that might be possible in the secondary sector, where pupil teacher ratios have improved in recent years, it would be a real challenge for the primary sector where many schools are already running at capacity because of the extra pupil numbers that have been enrolled during the past few years as the baby boom generation entered schooling.

The other group that may be worried by the announcement are school leaders and governors. This blog has already shown that staffing schools in London is a real challenge. Any reduction in funding may make it more difficult to offer competitive salaries compared with schools in the Home Counties. Now schools in London with large numbers of pupils receiving the Pupil Premium will be protected against the change to some extent, but less so in the secondary sector than in the primary schools.

Of course, the Chancellor may also be going to announce backing for the third runway at Heathrow. In which case he may have calculated that the Conservatives have already lost the South and West London vote next May so he might as well announce all the pain at the same time and have done with it. Losing the London mayoral race might be small price to pay for winning the Conservative leadership race by pleasing the Tory shires. But, surely, I am just being an old cynic.

 

Too bright for the Pupil Premium?

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The government seems to be briefing about possible changes to the Pupil Premium. The suggestion seems to be that bright children need it less than other children (choose an adjective with care here – dim/thick/less able but not SEN – all have implicit value assumptions associated with them). If this mooted alteration to the Pupil Premium is true, then it is the first change since it was agreed that pupils in primary schools needed more help than their secondary brothers and sisters and rates were altered accordingly. At the same time, pupils in care also received even more funding; quite rightly so.

Surely even the Tories wouldn’t want to say that because you are a bright five year-old, according to baseline testing, you don’t qualify for the Pupil Premium even though you are in a single parent household on low income and there is another toddler for your mother to look after, so you don’t receive the sort of attention you need to stimulate your innate ability. But, perhaps that is exactly what they do want to say. Reward the hardworking poor, but punish the children of those that aren’t aspirational for their offspring sounds like a Tory mantra.

Indeed, perhaps this is a change that is aligned to the return to selective school campaign. After all, if the Pupil Premium helps produce more children in primary schools for less well-off households that can pass the entry tests for selective schools then they will displace children from higher income brackets some of whose parents might then have to resort to paying for private education rather than allow then to attend secondary modern schools.

Of course, the concept of equality behind the Pupil Premium is to provide help where it is needed to bring everyone up to the level expected of them by the point at which you take the measurement of attainment; either Key Stage 2 and the move to secondary school or Key Stage 4 and the former school leaving age.

Now, if what the government are saying is that the use of Free School Meals as a proxy for entitlement isn’t the best measure, then we need to know what they are considering replacing it with? No doubt it would be helpful if any debate about changes to the Pupil Premium could also be a part of the discussions on a national funding formula for all schools. The present disparities in school funding levels mean that pupils from low income households in rural areas often receive much less funding than those in similar income households in some urban areas; especially in London. So, could the change to the Pupil Premium help iron out this problem if the government isn’t willing to tackle it in other ways?

One problem is that any degree of extra complexity added in to the Pupil Premium scheme will almost certainly significantly increase the cost of its administration. Sometimes, a universal flat rate programme is the most cost-effective, even if it is something of a blunt instrument. However, until the government reveals its hand, we won’t really know whether this is just an attempt to save money from the education budget or another attack on the low paid by this Tory government.

Tell it as is it – Part 2

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The Public Accounts Committee has just issued its latest report entitled the ‘The Funding for Disadvantaged Pupils’.  http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201516/cmselect/cmpubacc/327/32703.htm

In the summary it concludes that ‘… the Department for Education needs to be better at supporting schools to share and use best practice more consistently so that more schools use the Pupil Premium effectively. In addition, there remain inequalities in the core funding received by schools with very similar levels of disadvantage. As the impact of the Pupil Premium will take a long time to be fully realised, the Department needs to do more to demonstrate its emerging benefits in the meantime. We also urge the Department to carry out an early review of the effectiveness of the Early Years Pupil Premium.’

This seems to me to reinforce the point make in the study of the DfE by Dr Cappon, mentioned earlier this week by this blog in another post. Perhaps politicians have confused the concept of a market with the role of players within it. When I did Economics 101, or ‘O’ level as it was in the UK in those days, the first two lessons were on markets and effective demand. We were all told that we might like a sports car, but most of us would not be able to afford one. Our latent demand wasn’t the same as our effective demand for a second hand old banger as our first car. On markets, it was seen as the mechanism for determining the price of a good. Indeed, in areas such as the Stock Market, it still is. However, markets usually have winners and losers and losers react in different ways, such as by reducing supply or quitting the market.

Now the best thing to come out of the past twenty years in education is a recognition that there is more than one type of meaning to the term ‘equality’. It was a sharper focus on the recognition that spending on some pupils needs to be greater if they are to achieve a minimum standard of education that led to the Pupil Premium. I would argue that the Lib Dems were the first to articulate this concept under Phil Willis and Richard Grayson when he was at CentreForum as it then was. Indeed, Nick Clegg also brought an understanding of this notion of equality from his experience as an MEP to this debate.

The challenge, as the Public Accounts Committee and Dr Cappon make clear is, in a department of state where an idealistic notion of the market as a means of solving problems holds sway, how do you get consumers – the schools in this case – to use their resources to the end you seek: reducing the learning gap between the disadvantaged and others in society. Do you use a carrot – the equivalent of lowering prices – or a stick, send in Ofsted to create effective use of funds such as the Pupil Premium? The problem with the market model is that consumers -schools – have to want the same thing as the DfE, and that might not be their focus.

Is a ‘special offer this week – funds for disadvantaged pupils – buy here’ really the best way to eradicate the learning gap and increase social mobility? Clearly, the Public Accounts Committee don’t seem to think so. That they also think there are issues with the core funding of schools is another worry for another blog post.

Belt tightening in evidence

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Life is beginning to return to normal after the summer break. The final figures on teacher training offers will appear later this week. However, last week the government published the last data of education spending under the coalition with the figures from the Section 251 budgets for planned expenditure by schools and local authorities’ services for this financial year.

With the split between academies and maintained schools comparing between authorities on schoolings remains a bit of a challenge. In other children’s services it is still relatively clear what is spent by local authorities on say, youth justice or fostering. However, now that the majority of academies are what is known as ‘recoupment academies’ this means some comparison between per capita spending across the country is once again possible.

Overall spend per capita on the individual school budget at local authority levels has seen an increase in expected expenditure from £4,361 to £4,408 per capita, up by £47 or a little over one per cent. This may well help to explain why schools feel that their budgets have effectively been cut, since increased government take back through pension contributions and increased National Insurance contributions have been greater than the increase in income. To some extent this has also reduced the recruitment crisis in some places by diverting funds away from employing staff.

The local authority per capita expected spend doesn’t distinguish between spending in the primary and secondary sectors in the government’s aggregate figures, so it is impossible to tell whether the authorities where spending per capita is expected to be lower in 2015-16 than in 2014-15 is across the board or in only one of the sectors. What is interesting, however, is that five of the bottom ten ranked authorities, or five of nine if Middlesbrough is excluded on the basis that the figures don’t look credible, have selective secondary schools across the authority. Additionally, three of these authorities appear to have a lower per capita spend in 2015—16 than in the previous year. Now, as academies have a different financial year to maintained schools, that may account for some of the difference, but it isn’t clear whether or not that is the case form the data as presented.

Another interesting feature is that per capita spend in Inner London has also declined from £5,842 to £5,759 per capita in 2015-16. The drop isn’t across the board, but is greatest in Camden and Kensington and Chelsea. Tower Hamlets still tops the list with a spend of £6,842 per capita, down by some nine pounds per capita, but still some £350 ahead of Hackney, the next highest. (These figures exclude the single school in the City of London and on the Isles of Scilly where figures are much higher. However, it isn’t clear why the primary school in the City of London should receive £600 per pupil more than the average for schools in Tower Hamlets.)

Indications are that with increasing pupil numbers and the government’s commitment to austerity the 2016-17 budgets now being assembled at the macro level aren’t likely to be any more generous than this year, and might put schools under even more pressure at the per capita level. That will make free services like our TeachVac www.teachvac.co.uk more valuable to schools than spending money on services that often increase in price every year regardless of inflation levels and technological changes.