“Skint councils allowed to break minimum funding law”
So ran the headline headline in Schools Week on Friday 11 October, and when I read it, I swore very loudly.
Minimum per-pupil funding was very hard-won. Groups of headteachers across the country campaigned for it, including those in Cambridgeshire where I was previously a headteacher and which is one of the worst-funded education authorities in the country.
The argument we made to then-schools minister Nick Gibb (and it is one that still holds true) is that it just takes so much base funding to run a school. Drop below that minimum and your offer can quickly become sub-standard.
Class sizes become unmanageably large; the curriculum offer is severely reduced and the any bespoke provision you might be able to make for additional needs of any kind are non-existent.
Now, it seems Kent, Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole have been granted permission to fund their schools at a lower rate so that they can transfer money to their high needs block, which provides local authorities with additional SEND funding.
The problem with this argument is that it presupposes that mainstream schools can indeed run on less funding and that they do not have SEND funding challenges of their own to meet.
In our own county of Essex, this argument has some very damaging consequences for schools in the Uttlesford area.
The Essex Schools Forum has also just agreed to transfer some of the school funding to the high needs block at the request of the local authority for the second time in recent history. It feels as if this is becoming the ‘go-to’ solution to bail out overcommitted LA budgets.
Uttlesford is an area of Essex with no local grammar schools and in this respect is different from other areas of the county. Even the local independent school closed a few years ago.
There are no specialist SEND units in the locality or alternative provision schools. It is comprised entirely of genuinely inclusive comprehensives.
Saffron Walden County High School, with 2,200 pupils, is the largest school in Essex. It has 79 children with Education and Health Care Plans, 22 of whom are in Year 7.
The funding system is creating a deterrent to inclusivity.
It is the school with the highest number of EHCPs in the county. It is also on the minimum per-pupil funding band. The ADAICI data that drives this determination has not been reviewed recently because the percentage of pupils in the schools who are classified as PPG has also been rising year on year.
This minimum per-pupil funding means that it is one of the lowest-funded schools in the country. Its SEND top-up funding last year was a mere £170,000.
In other words, it is getting only £2,000 additional funding per EHCP pupil per year to pay for the large number of teaching assistants and SEND specialists it needs to meet the requirements of each of these children. It manages more SEND children than many specialist SEND schools, but on a tiny proportion of the funding they are allocated.
You can see why top-slicing the school to fund the county’s high heeds block goes down like a lead balloon with me as an inclusive school leader.
At the very time when questions are being asked about how ‘inclusive’ schools are, the funding system is creating a deterrent to inclusivity.
Being inclusive is becoming unaffordable. Or, as my CFO puts it, “adhering to your values is expensive, Caroline”. It is little wonder that some schools make themselves “unable to accommodate” large numbers of children with SEND. There is little incentive built into the system to do so.
Pleading the case of our local schools in Uttlesford has fallen on deaf ears at both Schools Forum and with the local authority.
Most colleague headteachers are not managing their schools on minimum per-pupil funding, which in itself is insufficient in an area without specialist AP or SEND provision and the LA is, of course, primarily motivated by meeting its own SEND obligations. It does not feel like their problem.
But it is very much the problem of Uttlesford headteachers who have had to cut their budgets year on year. Allowing LAs to fund schools below the minimum is an absolute nightmare for us, and we ask for this to be urgently reviewed.
Our schools need more funding, not less.
