Issue - meetings

Joint report of Corporate Directors of People and Finance and Resources

Julia Holmes and Kathryn Stevenson, Senior Commercial Business Partners, presented the report, which detailed the 2021/22 Dedicated Schools Grant (DSG) outturn position and the updated reserve balance and associated commitments.

It was stated that:

i.  the 2021/22 initial schools budget, as reported at Schools Forum on 25 January 2021, was £310.745m. The Education and Skills Funding Agency (ESFA) made in-year funding adjustments to the allocation of a reduction of £2.530m, resulting in a final budget of £308.215m for 2021/22;

ii.  the underspend of £0.177m on the pupil growth fund in 2021/22 was mainly due to the remaining balance on the Schools Block (£0.101m), that could not be equitably allocated to all schools through the NFF during the budget process, was allocated to the pupil growth fund. The remaining £0.076m was the balance on the contingency built into the budget that was not required. This approach was set out in a report to Forum on 01 December 2020 ‘Proposed pupil growth allocation for 2021/22’; 

iii.  the underspend of £0.019m on the trade union cover budget was mainly due to one union not taking up all its allotted allowance in 2021/22. The underspend will be taken into account when calculating the rate per pupil and lump sum per school for maintained schools and academies in the financial year 2023/24 if de-delegation continued in this financial year;

iv.  the overall variance on the Central Schools Services Block was an underspend of £0.212m. This underspend was mainly due to Virtual School funding being substituted by funding from the Pupil Premium Plus Grant (PPPG) and a vacancy in the safeguarding training team. From the financial year 2022/23, the DSG was no longer contributing to the Nottingham City Safeguarding Children Partnership due to the reduction in historical commitments funding. This reduction in funding was to be met by the Local Authority, who had allocated pressure funding of £0.109m to meet the contribution previously funded by the DSG during 2021/22;

v.  the ESFA introduced a one-off variation to the early years funding arrangements in response to the pandemic. Additional termly early years’ data collection arrangements were put into place for LA’s to submit pupil count data for census weeks in the Summer and Autumn terms 2021 to be used alongside the usual January 2022 census. In normal circumstances funding for 2021/22 would have been based 5/12 on the January 2021 census and 7/12 on January 2022;

vi.  the figures for early years funding (in table 4 of the report) did not yet reflect the final 2021/22 early years funding adjustment relating to the Spring term 2022, which would be processed by ESFA in July. It was estimated that this adjustment would increase the funding provided for 2 year olds by £0.057m, and decrease the funding provided for 3 & 4 year olds by £0.125m. The net clawback of funding would be taken from the early years’ contingency in the DSG reserve;

vii.  the underlying position once the July adjustments were taken into account was an over-spend of £0.074m  ...  view the full minutes text for item 34