Tag Archives: PRUs

Not an area for funding ‘cuts’.

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At the end of September, the DfE published its annual look at local authority expenditure on education and children’s services. Even though the rate of conversion by maintained schools to become academies is a mere trickle these days, the data on education spending on schools is difficult to judge over time in terms of trends, except to note that these are challenging times for schools. Planned local authority and school expenditure: 2022 to 2023 financial year – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

Elsewhere in the budgets of Children’s Services, it is not cuts that are uppermost in the minds of directors of these services, rather how to find the cash to fund continued growth in the need for their work.

At least the growth in the number of Looked After Children (LACs or CLA in government terminology) seems to have slowed to just a one per cent increase. According to the government release, ‘in 2022-23 planned net expenditure on CLA is £5.4 billion, a 10.4% increase from 2021-22. Expenditure on CLA consistently forms the largest proportion of LA spending on children’s and young people’s services. It represents 52.6% of this expenditure in 2022-23, slightly higher than in 2021-22 (51.1%).’ 

The notes in the government’s data release add that

‘Planned net expenditure increased across all categories for CLA, with the largest rises seen in asylum seeker children (53.0%), education of CLA (17.1%) and residential care (16.2%). The latest data published by the Home Office, shows a rise of 67.0% in the number of unaccompanied asylum seeker children applications for the year ending June 2022. Accordingly, LAs may be anticipating an increase in UASC numbers.’

Elsewhere, the releases notes that that there was a decline of £11.1 million in universal services for young people, presumably to help pay for the increase elsewhere, but that some £5 million extra was spent on targeted service for vulnerable young people.

There is no doubt some relief in the effects of the decline in the birth rate on spending on Early Years support, where fewer children in the age groups means less expenditure at a constant level of service.

The other area of concern for both central government and local authorities is the spending on Special Needs.  According to the release, ‘there were 96,000 planned SEN places (September to March) with total funding for the financial year 2022-23 of £916 million. This is an increase of 2,300 places and £20 million since 2021-22, and similar to 2018-19 figures which had the highest planned places and expenditure since 2013-14.’ With the growth in the secondary school population this figure is only set to increase further in the next few years.

After falling from around 17,500 in 2015-16, to a low of 11,300 in 2018-19, the number of places funded in Pupil Referral Units, or PRUs, once again remained above 13,000 in the latest data, with a small increase on the previous year’s number. This is an area where schools, whether academies or not can work together with local authorities to try to ensure as many young people remain in mainstream or special schools as possible and are not sent to PRUs.

Overall, these figures were collected in a period when inflation was still low. Those for next year will reflect how well Children’s Services have been able to cope with the turmoil of the past year and that of the coming winter.  

Unlike the previous post, this is not an area of public services where it is easy to areas where cuts can be made without damaging the lives of vulnerable young people.

4: the smallest recorded national pupil statistic in Education?

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You don’t often find numbers below 10 in DfE statistics, as there is usually too much of a risk that individual pupils could be identified. However, such small numbers can and do crop up from time to time. One such is in table 5 of this year’s statistics about schools and their pupils. https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/schools-pupils-and-their-characteristics-january-2019

The largest number in this Table is 4,716,244 – the number of pupils in state-funded primary schools counted in the January 2019 census. The smallest number is just four (4). This is the number of pupils of the Chinese ethnic group recorded as in Pupil Referral Units. In 2018, the number was five (5).

Apart from in Local Authority Alternative Provision, the percentage of minority Ethnic Pupils is greater in 2019 than it was in 2018. The increase was less in the primary sector, up from 33.1 to 33.5 than in the secondary sector, up from 30.3 to 31.3.

Interestingly, the ‘Black’ group as a whole registered no change in their share of the primary school population; steady at 5.5%, whereas the Asian Group that are mostly from the Indian sub-continent increased from 11.1% to 11.2%. Pupils of any other White background other than White British; Irish and the traveller and the Roma communities, increased from 7.1% to 7.3% making them the second largest sub-group in the primary sector.

With the downturn in admissions at the entry level of the primary school, it is interesting to ask whether birth rates are falling across all ethnic groups. Certainly, the difference in the total percentage of pupils from ethnic minority backgrounds between the primary and secondary sectors that was 2.8 in 2018, is now 2.2 in 2019.

Pupils from the Black ethnic group continue to be over-represented in both special schools and pupil referral units, although not in local authority alternative provision. However, the percentage of Back pupils in PRUs fell from 7.2% of pupils in such units in 2018, to 6.8% in 2019, against a percentage of 6.0% in the secondary sector from where most, but not all, PRU pupils have come from.

In numerical terms, the number of Black pupils in PRUs declined from 1,205 in 2018 to 1,104 in 2019. However, some might now be in alternative provision settings rather than in PRUs. Of course, there is no information about the scale of the off-rolling of pupils over the past year, and thus the ethnic backgrounds of pupils that have been taken off school rolls.

I suspect that the ethnic group labelled as ‘Mixed’ may well see the largest increases over the next few years as society becomes more diverse in nature. There are now around half a million pupil classified as from the ‘Mixed’ ethnic group in schools across England.

Almost one in five pupils in primary schools does not have English as their first language, although the total doesn’t identify the skewed distribution that can be found across England, with some schools teaching pupils that speak many different languages at home. This can be a real challenge to some less well funded primary schools. There is also the question as to whether the State should fund any first language tuition for these pupils or whether that is solely the responsibility of the family?