No sooner do we have a National Funding Formula for schools than it starts to dawn on some people that’ equal’ shares may not be the best way to achieve the policy goal of levelling up outcomes. How funds are distributed to schools are key to education outcomes, and have been ever since the State mandated schooling as the default position for the education of children whose parents did not, could not, or would not make other arrangements.
At the heart of the debate about the distribution of funds are two key principles: equity and the identification of the point of decision on how to spend funds. For much of the past 100 years the issues around the degree of hypothecation of funds was centre stage. With the devolution of budgets to schools in the 1990s, this issue was replaced for a long period by the debate over how much cash should be allocated to schooling.
Of course, the problem of creating an education system where all may enjoy success meant that the issue of how funds were allocated didn’t entirely disappear from the political agenda. However, the simple view of a hard National Funding Formula approach that put the view that ‘equal means the same for all’ centre stage – except of course that pay differentials and London weighting meant that it was never as simple as some would have liked – gained supremacy in thinking, although there were always other exceptions such as Education Opportunity Areas.
Funding policy is now under scrutiny once again, with the national levelling up agenda taking centre stage in the political agenda around policymaking. This policy hasn’t been fully worked through in terms of what it means for education and the hypothecation agenda. I wrote in an earlier blog post about how you enforce retention payments to teachers if that is a mechanism to be used in the prosecution of levelling up. Mandate schools and provide a hypothecated grant?
This week there have been two helpful additions to help the discussions on the funding debate. The House of Commons library has published a research briefing, excellent, as always, on School Funding https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-8419/CBP-8419.pdf
Teach First, the charity whose aims now extend well beyond just training teachers to work in schools with high levels of disadvantage pupils, has published a report around rethinking the Pupil Premium Rethinking pupil premium: a costed proposal for levelling up | Teach First The Pupil Premium is, of course, a great example of a semi-hypothecated grant to schools, in that its criteria for distribution are made clear, but its actual use by schools is not determined closely as part of the funding.
At present, different rules also apply as between maintained schools and academies and Academy Trusts in how funds distributed through the National Funding formula may be aggregated to cover central costs. This is an interesting area of the hypothecation debate that merits further discussion.
But in the end, decisions about the allocation of funds will always be in the hands of those that provide the funding. Local council taxpayers can be grateful that funding schools is no longer a part of their costs in urban areas. In the countryside, and where there are large bills for special needs transport, it is a different matter, as school transport costs are left to local council taxpayers to cover.
John Howson 