Issue - meetings

Joint report of Corporate Director for People and Director of Education Services

Further to minute 6, dated 11 October 2022, Kathryn Stevenson, Senior Commercial Business Partner, presented the report, and stated the following:

·  theEducation and Skills Funding Agency(ESFA) were contacted on 12 October in order for the Local Authority (LA) to obtain clarification of legitimate options under the current regulations to allocate additional funding to schools including from DSG reserves. The response received was that a blanket approach would be via the annual delegated budget via the Authority Pro-forma Tool (APT) but this would be limited to the tightening rules. These are the rules that mean that LA’s funding formulae are supposed to be moving at least 10% closer to the National Funding Formula (NFF) each year;

·  as the LA mirrored the NFF in 2021/22, this means we can only go up to 2.5% above any of the NFF rates. As over half of schools are receiving protection from the Minimum Funding Guarantee (MFG) the response clarified that a disapplication request would be required to allow the funding to be passed on fully and that this would need to be a one-off. The only other option suggested by ESFA was to distribute additional targeted high needs funding pot to encourage schools to be more inclusive or assist schools with high numbers of high needs pupils. As targeted high needs funding guidance states that this should only be received by a minority of an LA’s schools, this option is limited as a mechanism for getting additional funding to all schools;

·  the most simple and transparent approach for getting additional funding out to all schools consistently is through the basic per pupil rate. The maximum uplift to the per pupil rates that will be permissible across all key stages is £85, which would take the primary basic per pupil rate 2.5% above the NFF rate of £3,403. Based on October 2021 pupil numbers, funding all primary and secondary schools at an extra £85 would equate to an additional £3.662m. The actual distribution would be based on October 2022 census pupil numbers once confirmed and will depend on the exact funding available, as outlined in the financial implications section of the report;

·  a consultation with mainstream schools was undertaken during 15-29 November 2022. This included a question as to whether this was a fair approach to distributing additional funding. A summary of consultation responses is included at appendix B to the report.

·  a disapplication request was submitted to the ESFA by the 18 November deadline. This asked for permission to adjust the MFG for schools receiving protection as a one-off in 2023/24 to allow them to benefit from up to a maximum of £85 per pupil. The disapplication request will be updated with the outcomes of the consultation and Schools Forum vote on recommendation 1;

·  the report proposes the utilisation of £1.438m from the DSG reserve to partially fund the proposed one-off distribution to mainstream schools in 2023/24. This is the balance of £2m, which was ring-fenced in the DSG reserve  ...  view the full minutes text for item 13