Tag Archives: Local Government Association

SEND funding switched to schools?

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Has the funding of SEND just become even more complicated for 2026-27? Under the arrangements announced by the DfE, cash has moved from the High Needs Block to other funding streams within the Dedicated Schools Grant.  Dedicated schools grant (DSG): 2026 to 2027 – GOV.UK

Now I am no expert in schools funding, and the labyrinthine calculations employed by the DfE in deciding both the size of the cake and its distribution.  However, it does seem as if all local authorities will see their High Needs Block funding stream reduced in 2026-27 when compared with 2025-26. As seem usual, some London boroughs have been less affected by the change than other upper tier authorities, with 10 of the 20 local authorities with the smallest percentage decrease being London boroughs. There are no London boroughs within the top 20 authorities with the largest percentage reductions, with the highest ranked London borough coming in at 23rd place.

Oxfordshire, where I served as the Cabinet member until May’s elections, has seen a decline of 18.75% in its High Needs block. That decline ranks it in the top 25 local authorities for the largest reductions in their High Needs Block. Hopefully, the cash has been distributed to schools, but the Schools Block for the County has also reduced, by around £5 million – effectively a standstill. No doubt the reduction is due to falling pupil numbers on a formula that is heavily driven by pupil numbers. The implications for schools faced with falling rolls was discussed in my blog post How might a school react to falling rolls? | John Howson

What does the DfE say about the High Needs block changes?

16. As the existing SEND system will continue for 2026 to 2027, the Department’s assessment is that limiting the funding in this way will not necessarily translate into negative impacts on children and young people with SEND and will not mean that we see negative equalities impacts. This is because the requirements on local authorities to secure provision to meet the needs of children and young people with SEND will remain in place, and local authorities must meet these requirements. The consequent budget pressures will therefore lead to accruing DSG deficits rather than having a negative impact on SEND provision.

And 17. We recognise that the size of deficits that some local authorities may accrue while the statutory override is in place may not be manageable with local resources alone, and will bring forward arrangements to assist with them as part of broader SEND reform plans, as explained in the Government’s provisional local government finance settlement document. Given that local authorities will continue to be protected from the adverse impact of those deficits through the so-called “statutory override”, and because we are seeking to protect school level allocations of high needs funding through the conditions of grant attached to the DSG, we do not envisage any adverse impact on those children and young people with protected characteristics, including those with disabilities. The national funding formula for schools and high needs 26-27

Of course, this assumes that the cash channelled through the Schools Block of the DSG is actually spent on SEND by schools, and accounted for as such in academy and MAT budgets. I am sure that will be the case.

Still, those special schools that see the base funding per pupil stuck at £10,000 for another year will no doubt wonder what has happened to inflation accounting.

All we can hope for is that it won’t be too long before the SEND reforms are announced. However, with consultation session running into 2026, it is difficult to see how SEND reforms and local government reorganisation won’t become mixed up together, with who knows what results. Perhaps the new arrangements announced for Surrey might give an indication. Hopefully, the fact that West Northamptonshire has the largest reduction in the High Needs Block of any upper tier authority (25%+) is due to its past history, not its present resourcing.

The governance of our schools – does pay matter?

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Later this month Directors of Children’s Services will meet alongside their Directors of Adult Social Services colleagues for their annual conference. I am sure that one of the topics in the bar, if not in the conference hall, will be the pay grades for public servants.

In August this year, I once again started collecting data about headteacher vacancies, including starting salaries. This has been a research interest of mine since the early 1980s, and I still have my reports for the majority of years between 1984 and 2023, with the exception of the years between 2011-2014.

Unlike the pay of most teachers, and school leaders below the grade of headteacher, salaries of headteachers are less well controlled, and more subject to market forces. Interestingly, the first report of an advert for a headteacher on a salary of more than £100,000 was as far back as 1998. This was for the headship of a secondary school in an inner London borough.  

Fast forward to the autumn of 2025 and there have been four secondary schools with advertised starting salaries of £113,000. The most a headteacher of the largest schools can earn according to the pay scales is £158,000, if the school is located in the inner London Pay area.

Why does the pay of headteachers matter to directors of children’s services and their staff? At present, they still provide the governance backbone to much of the system-wide decision-making about local schooling. To do so effectively needs a pipeline of staff willing to take on the most senior roles supporting education.

These days, there are few educationalists in the top posts as directors as these are mostly held by those with a social work background. However, most authorities still have a senior post for an officer responsible for everything from SEND to school transport, pupil place planning and school building, whether opening new ones, closing existing ones because of falling roles or just maintaining the fabric of those open schools.  All this has to be achieved in cooperation with academy trusts, dioceses and the many others that now run schools across England.

When I came across a one form entry primary school, with just over 200 pupils in roll, offering a starting salary of £92,447, I wondered what the director earned in the same authority? Fortunately, senior officer salaries in local government are open to scrutiny, so I know that the director has a salary of less than £170,000, after a number of years of service. However, the most senior education officer earns less than £120,000, and little more than the advert for a secondary school headteacher quoted above.

The issue is about comparability. Chief officers of academy trusts earn more than their headteachers in most cases, sometimes substantially more. Is running a MAT much more challenging than being a senior officer in a local authority with responsibility for both community schools and authority wide strategy plus probably a couple of other roles as well? Are local government officers underpaid? I think you know my feeling on that issue, and I write as former cabinet member for children’s services.

Does it matter? I believe that it does, because it is another symptom of a refusal to understand the importance of a governance system for schooling that will help develop our schooling system for the needs of children that entered school at three this September, and won’t retire from work until the 2080s under present arrangements.

Governance matters, and for good governance you need good staff. Are current differentials between the salaries for headteachers, those running MATs, and our local government officers fair and equitable. I think not.

SEND, fuel duty and the Apprenticeship Levy  

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SEND was identified as one of their 3 top priorities by 60% of a random sample of 100 delegates at the recent Lib Dem Conference. 45% ranked it first and 15% second, often behind funding in general.

This result isn’t a surprise to anyone in education, although falling rolls doesn’t yet seem to have worked its way up the political agenda to be a top priority for councillors and activists. I am sure that will change.

Anyway, as regular readers know, before the summer break I expressed concerns about the SEND deficit many local authorities are facing, only to have the end date for the ‘statutory override’ kicked down the road from March 2026 to March 2028 two days after my blog appeared. I m sure there is no link between the two, just great timing on my part.

So, what might local authorities do. Two suggestions, one possible and one for consideration. Local authorities need to check that they are spending all the Apprenticeship Levy raise by them in its present form. They should not be returning any unspent cash, raised from maintained schools to HM Treasury. Apprenticeships across the SEND landscape can be a good investment, and certainly a better use of the cash than sending it back to Westminster. Hopefully, all local authorities are now making full use of the Levy cash collected.

My second suggestion needs some work. At present, SEND transport is a massive cost to many local authorities. The recent NI hike won’t have helped, and should be recognised in the funding for the High Needs Block. If not, it is a tax on SEND, and indeed education as a whole.

The other tax is Fuel Duty. Unlike VAT, I don’t think it is recoverable by local authorities, despite making up around 50% of the price of fuel at the pump. Assume a taxi does two journeys a day for 190 days a year, and uses a litre of diesel for each journey with a SEND young person. That’s around 380 litres a year. As 400 is an easier number to use, let’s round it up to that number. To compensate, let’s say diesel is £1.30 per litre. This puts the fuel cost at £520 per taxi per year. Ten taxis, £5,200; 100 taxis: £52,000. Now assume 50% fuel duty and the possible saving mount up.

Agriculture has long had a red diesel scheme to cut fuel costs.  Education should not be paying income from the High Needs block back to HM Treasury in tax. Like business rates, a fuel rebate scheme should be in place where local authorities certify fuel purchased, and receive a rebate of the duty.

However, this might incentivise the use of fuel-inefficient vehicles, so the scheme should be predicated on a growing percentage of vehicles being electric, and thus not requiring the rebate. Vehicles could also be required to be less than five years old, and with a minimum miles per litre outcome.

Such a scheme won’t solve the problem, but every little helps, and it might encourage the use of electric taxis that are both cleaner for the environment and, until the government changes the rules, less costly in tax paid by local authorities.

Windfall profits and SEND

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There is no doubt that the rise in demand for special school places over the past few years was neither anticipated nor effectively dealt with by the State. One consequence is that large amount of off-balance sheet debt being carried by many local authorities responsible for schooling in England. Another consequence, highlighted by the Liberal Democrats in a press release issued today, is what might be described as the ‘windfall’ profits being made by a few in the SEND sector. Lib Dems demand cap on SEND providers profits as top firms rake in £100m – Liberal Democrats

When the highest paid director of a company operating both care homes for children and special schools is paid over £300,000, or more than twice the salary of a Director of Children’s Services commissioning the use of places in the schools and homes, it seems sensible to question whether such use of public money should continue.

At this point, I must make clear that I am a capitalist. The 40 years I have traded on my own account and through a company, as well as held a portfolio of investments in other companies. However, there are two issues that concern me. Where should the boundary line between services offered by the State and those run by the private sector be drawn? And how should price be determined?

It is interesting, as I have noted before, that in the USA and many other countries, public transportation is just that: a service run by the State. In England it has become a battleground between the State and private enterprise and the differing political opinions. Most would expect SEND to be a public service.

What often seems to be lacking is a mechanism to regulate the costs of suppliers to the State. When the private sector funds its enterprise by borrowing to provide the services and then expects the State to service that debt with a profit element added, it seems to me like time to take the service out of the private sector, and back into public provision.

In the case of SEND school places, national and local government should work together to prove places in state-run schools that would obviate the need for private sector intervention. This means the State, in this case the DfE, being much more interventionalist than has been the case.

The Liberal Democrats, of which I am a member and activist, noted in their press release that

‘Research commissioned by the party and carried out by the House of Commons Library showed that the top handful of profiting companies each took home tens of millions a year. One Group, operators of 28 special schools, turned over just over £200 million a year, making £44 million in profit – a margin of over 20%. That profit is 150% what the company made in 2022.’

How many more teachers might the £44 million have funded? While we wait for the government to produce a White Paper on SEND, perhaps the Local Government Association should set up a taskforce to remove the need to use the private sector.

I am sure that when John Stuart Mill, the nineteenth century philosopher, said that’ it was the duty of the State to see it citizens were educated, not to educate them itself’ he did not expect the cost to the State to be more than a reasonable amount.

Are you paying too much to advertise a teaching vacancy?

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The most read blog post this month is the one from 2020 entitled ‘How much should it cost to advertise a vacancy?’ Teacher Recruitment: How much should it cost to advertise a vacancy? | John Howson (wordpress.com) So far, yesterday’s 10th birthday post comes in second highes, with 20 views as against the vacancy post that reviewed the publication of the tes company accounts for 2019.

Today, the tes group, now entirely shorn of it print heritage, released its accounts for 2021-22 to August 2022. The company, fronted by its UK management, is ultimately owned by Onex Partners V, part of the Canadian ONEX Group of equity investors. Their third quarter report for 2022 identifies an investment of $98 US in the Tes Global (“Tes”), an international provider of comprehensive software solutions for the education sector  18d46e0 f-a5b9-435a-a039-9849ef723683 (onex.com) page 9

So, our major teacher recruitment platform, now offering a much wider staff management service to schools, increased its UK (mainly England) turnover from £54 million to £68 million in the year to August 2022. How important both staff management and the UK are to the profit of ONEX can be determined form the following figures

Turnover             2022                     2021

UK                        £68.2 mn          £54.0 mn

Europe                £  2.9 mn             £ 2.6 mn

Rest of World     £  9.0  mn           £ 9.0 mn

Income

Staff

Management    £61.2 mn          £56.5  mn

All activities      £80.2 mn           £66.1  mn

TES accounts – see link above page 29

So, in the last school year the tes took £68 million pounds from UK schools, the bulk of the money for recruitment and staff management by subscriptions from schools. 84% of staff management revenue came from subscription income and, as the accounts note (page 2) this was a 26% increase in revenue, presumably as more schools and Trusts migrated to subscription packages from point of sale purchase of advertising. The profit for the operating year was £28.7 million compared with £2.3 million the previous year that was badly affected by covid.

The group values its software at £46 million. That leaves me wondering what the book value of TeachVac’s simple but effective job matching service should be? Perhaps the £3 million suggested by our advisers is a little on the mean side.

TeachVac http://www.teachvac.co.uk costs less than £150,000 a year to operate. Being generous, it might cost £500,000 if operating on a similar cost model to the tes. The DfE job site probably costs a bit more, but we don’t actually know how much. The question for schools, MATs and the education sector is ‘How much of the money you are spending with the tes is for the downstream activities on staff management and how much for the job bord and matching service, and is it value for money?

Assume only 10% is for the matching, that could be £5-6 million of the subscription income after allowing for the tes turnover on Hibernia and other activities. TeachVac was established to demonstrate to the sector the cost-effective nature of modern technology over the former print advertising methods of recruitment. Readers can make up their own minds over value for money when comparing the £500 annual subscription to TeachVac that will reduce as more schools sign-up, and the cost of a subscription to tes.

How PTRs have changed over time

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Forty years ago, I wrote an article about variations in local authority provision for education that appeared in the Oxford Review of Education (Volume 8, No2). Part of the discussion in the article centred around the range of pupil teacher ratios within schools after local government reorganisation outside London in 1974 had completed the changes to the local government landscape started in London a decade before.

Of course, our school system was very different in 1974. Most authorities were still transiting from a two tier selective system to a fully comprehensive system; most based their new systems upon the traditional two tiers, but some used one of the variations of first, middle and upper schools that constituted the three tier system.

Local authorities had the freedom in the 1970s to decide how much of their funding to spend upon schooling, and although there were national guidelines on spending on resources and staffing, they were not mandatory. However, teachers’ pay, then as now the largest item of a school’s expenditure, was centrally controlled, as was the ratio of promoted posts to classroom teachers. The differential between the highest paid teacher and a classroom teacher was much narrower than it is today, especially in the secondary sector.

On the staffing side, there were few support staff, and hardly any classroom assistants working in schools forty years ago, so one class one teacher was very much the model across the board, with classroom teachers in the primary sector, and comprehensive schools following the model of the selective sector with subject specialists replacing classroom teachers that had been commonplace in some secondary modern schools.

Pupil Teacher Ratios (PTRs) can be calculated in the same way today as they were in 1974. Helpfully, the DfE published the results for all state-funded schools in England, by local authority, based upon the data collected in the November Staffing Census. The latest data, published in June 2022, was from the November 2021 census, so now some 14 months old.

What is interesting, despite the changes in local government boundaries is to compare the range of 1974 PTRs in the secondary sector with those from the 2021 census.

Best PTRWorst PTRdifference
197415.719.74
198013.618.65
202113.618.44.8
Source Howson 1980 and DfE 2022
Source Howson 1980 and DfE 2022

 Compared with 1974, the difference between the best and worst local authority areas was greater in 2021 than in 1974, and similar to the difference in 1980 when the article was being prepared. What is noticeable is that both the best and the worst levels improved between 1974 and 1980, but are now, forty years later, still very similar to where they were in 1980. This despite academies, unitary authorities and the devolution of budgets to individual schools.

Even more interesting is the position of London schools. In 1980, London boroughs occupied eight of the top ten places for ‘staffing’, using data from the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy data. In the 2021 census, four outer London boroughs have dropped down the ranking, as has Newcastle, to be replaced by northern towns and cities. However, London, now with individual boroughs rather than the combined Inner London Education Authority still takes a disproportionate number of the places in the authorities with the most favourable PTRs.

Since 2010/11, all but two local authorities with data for the whole period have seen a deterioration in the secondary PTR for their area. Slough and Southend on Sea, both authorities with selective school systems, have seen the biggest worsening in secondary PTRs over the period of Tory government.

With the pressure on funding, it is interesting to speculate what the outcome of the 2022 census will be when published this June. Could we witness some of the worst secondary PTRs in half a century?

TeachVac special offer

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TeachVac are now offering a FREE subscription, up until February 2023, if you register a school with TeachVac now! From February, TeachVac will invoice a yearly subscription of £1 per match with a ceiling of £500 for secondary schools and £75 for primary schools.

Sign up at   http://www.teachvac.co.uk

TeachVac has made 2,000,000 + MATCHES MADE in 2022

 TeachVac has listed 100,000 + TEACHING JOBS in 2022

2023 vacancies will only be listed for schools signed up to TeachVac.

The average secondary school received more than 500 matches in 2022.

2023 will be another difficult year for teacher recruitment, so can you afford to miss this offer?

Fire Chiefs support school sprinkler system for new schools

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Those readers that have been following this blog for some years will know that one of the few matters that The Daily Mail and I both agree upon is the need to fit sprinkler systems in new schools.

On the 15th April 2019 this blog carried a post headed ‘Install Sprinkler Systems’. This followed a call to ensure all new schools had sprinkler system built into them during construction.

Zurich Insurance, a major insurer for local government risks has now come out in support of this suggestion in a new report. A review of their view can be found in this link to pbctoday https://www.pbctoday.co.uk/news/health-safety-news/fire-risk-in-schools/81974/

I fully support the recommendation that all schools should be built with sprinkler systems for the reasons cited in my blog post of April 2019.

Zurich found that the average school posed a fire risk 1.7 times greater than non-residential buildings. When compared to 2.9 million non-household properties, school buildings were also three times more likely to fall into the ‘high’ fire risk category (58% vs 20%).

Now the National Fire Chiefs Council has added their voice to those calling for the compulsory fitting of sprinklers in schools.

Over the last five years, 1,100 classrooms have been gutted by fire, with 47 schools destroyed among a total of 2,300 fire incidents – while just 2% of buildings were fitted with sprinklers. The National Fire Chiefs Council is calling for sprinklers to be mandatory in all new schools, in line with Scotland and Wales.

This is a powerful new ally in the campaign to fit sprinklers.

Those concerned about climate change might also add that an unnecessary fire in a school, as in any building, releases gases from the burring materials into the atmosphere that could be prevented by having installed sprinklers.

The removal of the requirement for sprinklers in new schools was a short-sighted measure that ought to have been changed already. Better some water damage than the destruction of a whole school and the disruption to the education of many children.

Schooling also needs a shake up

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The news, in a leaked document, stating that the government is considering the way that the NHS operates, prompts me to remind readers that I have long felt that the arrangements devised under Labour for schools that were enthusiastically espoused by Michael Gove in 2010, in terms of how schooling is arranged, also need urgent review.

Some, including myself, have always maintained the importance of ‘place’ in our education system, and especially the school system. A sense of location is often weakest in relation to higher education and the university sector. However, even there, a place name, such as Oxford, has always worked well, grounding a university in a particular location. For schools, the link to a locality is generally much stronger than for higher education, and parents normally want their children to attend a good local school.

The academy programme dealt a severe blow to the locality based school system that was already under threat as local government fell out of favour at Westminster and institution level decision-making became the favoured approach. The 1988 Education Reform Act, with the move to local financial management and placing power in the hands of head teachers and governors, wrecked any chance of creating a locally managed system across England.

The arrival of multi-academy trusts in 2010, sometimes with headquarters many miles away for the location of the school for which it had responsibility failed to build upon the experience of the diocesan school model, where large diocese, especially in the Roman Catholic Church, often had responsibility for schools in several different local authority areas. Sometimes this worked well, but not always.

Crippling the funding for local authorities wrecked features such as staff development across a local area and the ability to talent spot future leaders, especially middle leaders, where most teachers don’t want to move house for promotion. It may be no coincidence that wastage rates for teachers of five to seven years of experience have increased as local frameworks for teacher support have been eroded.

You only have to read the recent post on this blog about Jacob’s Law, to see the important role local authorities play in the admission and management of pupils across a local area. To allow individual schools to frustrate the ability to find a place for a pupil is poor government, as anyone reading that Serious Case Review can easily understand.

The recent problems with the supply of laptops and internet access to those without, would have been better handled locally, with strategic support from government. Managing it from Westminster showed how this central model for operation rather than strategy just didn’t really work.

One question remains, should schooling, like the NHS, be largely run by professionals, with little local democratic involvement or should schooling have a strong local democratic element in the way it operates, in view of both the number of families involved and its role in the local economy. I have made my view known on this blog over the past eight years.

When I started in education, two phrases were in regular use: ‘a local service nationally administered’ or a ‘partnership’. Is it now time to work out what type of school system we want for the rest of the twenty first century?

Time for Jacob’s Law

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The naming of a young person in Serious Case Review Report is rare. But this week the Report into the death of Jacob in Oxfordshire contained his name. The family gave permission, and hope it will ensure the report is more widely read and acted upon. If so, it is a brave decision, and one that I applaud.

You can read the Report at https://www.oscb.org.uk/oscb-publishes-a-child-safeguarding-practice-review-concerning-jacob/ Full report link at bottom of the press notice

Three agencies, the Police, Children’s Social Services and Education have learning points to take from the Review. In this blog, I will concentrate on the education aspects, as they contain a message heard before on this blog.

Jacob was born in Oxfordshire, later moved to Northumbria, where I suspect he was educated in a First School, and then a Middle School, before being moved in Year 6 to an ‘alternative education provision’ – presumably a PRU?

In July 2017, note the date, the family returned to Oxfordshire. The Report concludes that:

5.1 He was not on roll at any education provision and was a child missing education for 22 months

Jacob’s mandatory need for education was not provided by Oxfordshire County Council when he lived at home and when he was in the care of the local authority both in and when out of county for 5 months. Four educational settings were asked to take Jacob on roll, however largely due to his perceived behaviours and risks to other students he remained off roll for almost 2 years. Jacob’s family were offered the right of appeal when places were refused. His situation was considered by education panels such as the In Year Fair Access Panel and Children Missing Education to little effect and his needs were overseen and monitored by various professionals, including the Virtual School and the Independent Reviewing Officer Service whilst in local authority care. There were no formal dispute resolutions raised14 by Children’s Social Care and his situation was not escalated to the Education Skills and Funding Agency (ESFA) as it should have been.

Had this been an isolated case then this would be understandable, but a month before Jacob arrived back in Oxfordshire I had had an exchange in public with the Cabinet Member for Education at the June 2017 Cabinet meeting of the County Council. Not all questions are for political gain, and this was one where I genuinely thought that there was an issue to be addressed. The question asked:

Oxfordshire county council CABINET – 20 JUNE 2017 ITEM 4 – QUESTIONS FROM COUNTY COUNCILLORS

Question from Councillor Howson to Councillors Harrod and Hibbert-Biles “How many children taken into care over the past three school years and placed ‘out county’ have had to wait for more than two weeks to be taken onto the roll of a school in the area where they have been moved to and what is the longest period of time a child has waited for a place at a school in the area where they have been re-located to during this period?” 

As you will see, I asked both the Education Cabinet Member and Cllr Harrod for Children’s Social Services and received this answer:

Answer Over the past three years it has been exceptional for a Looked After Child to be taken onto the roll of an out of county school in under two weeks. Indeed, of the nine cases of primary age pupils we’ve looked at, the quickest a pupil was placed was 12 days (there were two) and the slowest was 77 days. For the 22 secondary age pupils the picture is even worse, with 3 weeks the quickest placement and a couple taking fully 6 months to get some of our most vulnerable young people into a stable school setting.

The main reason for this completely unacceptable state of affairs is that the Council has no power to direct an academy to admit a Looked After Child. The only way we can force an academy’s hand is to get a direction from the Educations & Skills Funding Agency and this, as you can see from the foregoing times, can be a very long winded bureaucratic process.

The fact that it takes so long for academies to admit our Looked After Children shows how doggedly our officers pursue the matter; I suspect that many other local authorities simply give up when they meet an intransigent academy that doesn’t want to take responsibility for educating their vulnerable young people.

The minutes of the meeting note my supplementary question and the response as:

Supplementary: In response to an invitation from Councillor Howson for the Cabinet Member to work with Councillor Howson and the labour opposition to see what could be done Councillor Hibbert-Biles recognised that it was a national situation, and she would be asking for a meeting with local MPs and relevant minister.

How distressing to read the national recommendation in the Serious Case Review that:

Recommendation 2: This Review asks the Department for Education to acknowledge the education key learning and findings from Jacob’s Review and provide feedback as to the effectiveness of the Education and Skills Funding Agency process in resolving issues in a timely manner. The Review asks the Department of Education to provide statute and guidance to local areas and their communities on how to manage the Governance arrangements with academy run schools and local education departments who currently cannot be mandated to accept children on roll.

And in the local recommendations that:

Action Plan 2: The Education System

The key learning set out below is fully addressed in this action plan for children in the education system in Oxfordshire, overseen by the Chair of the OSCB Safeguarding in Education Sub-Group Key Learning:

An education system that ensures:

1. The paramount importance of the role of schools in keeping children safe

2. An education package is put in place in a timely manner for those children who may show challenging behaviours

3. Those children missing education are known and action is swift

This Action Plan should pay particular attention to ensuring: – Restorative work to resolve the fragmented arrangements between academy schools, alternative provisions and the local authority to ensure collective ownership – Policy and procedures to track when children are not on roll – The function of Education Panels in Oxfordshire (In Year Fair Access and Children Missing Education) – The local application of the Education Skills Funding Agency intervention – Education packages for children who may be at risk of exploitation and also present a risk to others.

For those that read the whole Report, there is further evidence on page 31 and footnote 56 of other issues about school admissions around the same time.

Here’s what I wrote on this blog on the 23rd June 2017:

In my post on 11th June, after the outcome of the general election was known, I suggested some issues that could still be addressed by a government without an overall majority. First among these was the issue of school places for young people taken into care and placed outside of the local authority. They have no guarantee of access to a new school within any given time frame at present. It seemed to me daft that a parent could be fined for taking a child out of school for two weeks to go on holiday but a local authority could wait six months for a school place to be provided for a young person taken into care.

The Cabinet Question reproduced above then appears followed by:

I found the answer deeply depressing. However, the good news is that MPs from the three political parties representing Oxfordshire constituencies have agreed to work together to take the matter forward. Thank you to MPs, Victoria Prentice, Layla Moran and Anneliese Dodds, for agreeing to seek action to remedy this state of affairs.

If readers have data about the issue elsewhere in England, I would be delighted to hear from you, so pressure can be put on officials nationally to ensure a rapid change in the rules.

I had forgotten that unique letter signed by every Oxfordshire MP after I had made my suggestion.

Nothing happened. Jacob died. We cannot wait any longer.

The DfE must act now to ensure all children have a school place within a specified time frame, whether they move to a new area or are excluded by a school. There must be a register of unplaced children of school age that is regularly reviewed by a senior officer and a politician in each local authority, and Ofsted should update the Secretary of State each year about the national picture.

It is time for a Jacob’s Law. His death will not then have been for nothing.

Read more on this BBC Report into the case https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-55841644