Finding the Formula - UK | Zurich Insurance · Finding the Formula A comprehensive guide to school...

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SUPPORTED BY October 2016 FINDING THE FORMULA A COMPREHENSIVE GUIDE TO SCHOOL FUNDING

Transcript of Finding the Formula - UK | Zurich Insurance · Finding the Formula A comprehensive guide to school...

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t h e t r u e c o st o f t h e f u n d i n g c r i s i s

T he school funding system is messy and unfair – and for decades politicians have promised to fix it.

At the moment, England’s schools have a patchwork funding system that’s overseen by local authorities (LAs). The amount different areas receive is skewed by an out-of-date and over complicated system, with some areas of the country receiving thousands of pounds more per pupil than others.

To solve this, the government has promised to create a new national funding formula for schools. This will remove variations between areas and ensure all pupils are treated fairly.

It sounds like good news. Except, as this supplement will explore, it’s not that straightforward.

While some schools are set to gain money under a new system, others – mostly those in the inner cities – are expecting to lose cash. No one knows how much they’ll lose, or how they’ll be helped to transition to the new funding arrangements. Headteachers are operating in limbo.

Just a week after Justine Greening was appointed education secretary in mid-July, she announced a delay to the funding overhaul, which has been pushed back to 2018. For headteachers working in the worst-funded areas – who are desperate for reform – this was a huge blow. Many warn they are already at breaking point. They have cut staff and subjects from the curriculum, they’re operating in run-down buildings. They say their situation is untenable.

To make matters worse, all this is taking place at a time when schools are facing a perfect storm of falling real-term funding and rising costs.

In this supplement we’ll be exploring what a new funding formula could look like. We’ll be examining which areas of the country are the best and worst funded, and profiling how school leaders – whether they’re part of an academy trust or a LA – are making ends meet. We’ll also be examining the spiralling costs facing headteachers. And we’ll be hearing what factors they hope the government will recognise when designing a new formula.

Plus, to help you get your head around the funding changes, we have a timeline of  key milestones, and a Q&A guide to all the proposals.

− Rebecca Ratcliffe

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Helping schools make the most of the pupil premium

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Timeline of a funding crisis

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opinion – Heads’ hopes for the new funding formula

How school funding works q&a

what factors will decide how much a school gets?

preparations for the new funding formula

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How well funded is your school?

this content has been supported by Zurich municipal (whose brand it displays). all content is editorially independent. For more on this subject, visit: theguardian.com/teacher-network/series/the-crisis-in-school-funding

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How does funding make its way from government  to  schools?It’s a three-step process. First, the government decides how much education funding there should be nationally (for schools, for pupils with high needs, and early years) – as part of the spending  review.

The government uses a formula to allocate that money among those three categories, or blocks nationally. It then distributes money from each block to local authorities (LAs). Importantly, money is doled out on a per-pupil basis, and the allocation is based almost entirely on what they were given last year (this is known as “spend plus”, and is the reason why different LAs continue to get different amounts per pupil). Lastly – and confusingly – LAs then apply their own local formulae to amend the amount they give to each school in their area, and keep a small amount back to fund their own services.

Academies are funded differently because their money comes directly from central government. But the base amount they get is equal to the per-pupil amount for maintained schools in their local area. They also receive a top up to pay for services which maintained schools receive for free from their LA.

What’s happening to school funding?The formula that’s used to decide how much funding schools receive is out-of-date and unfair. At the moment, Rotherham and Plymouth have the same proportion of pupils eligible for free school meals (FSM), yet Rotherham receives nearly £500 more per pupil.

The government has promised to overhaul this system. In March, it launched a consultation proposing a national funding formula.

Why is the current system so unfair?Before 2006-07, all school funding was decided entirely by LAs – some of whom, especially in urban areas, spent more than others. From 2007, the Labour government introduced a Dedicated Schools Grant (DSG), which guaranteed that education funding allocated by government would be spent on schools. But the DSG worked by guaranteeing the existing, variable, level of per-pupil funding in each authority, and then adding more money on every year (spend plus). So, it has locked into place these historic variations in spending. To make matters worse, as the demographics of areas changed over time, the funding didn’t move to take account for it.

Why is it so hard to develop a new formula?Designing a new funding formula is actually easy. It is, technically, quite straightforward to calculate how much it costs to educate a typical pupil and the extra costs associated with certain  circumstances.

The real problem is all stakeholders agreeing to enact this formula, given the impact it will have on  schools.

So what’s the problem? Some schools will lose out? Which type of schools?In a nutshell, if some schools are under funded (receiving less money per pupil than a national formula calculates they should have), and there’s little or no extra money available, then the only way they can receive more is if the over funded schools lose out. This, unsurprisingly, goes down badly with such schools (and MPs).

At the moment it’s London that receives the most, and rural shire counties that get the least. So, in general, we’d expect to see a shift away from London to the counties. But it’s a complex picture. Not all schools in high-funded areas will lose and not all in low-funded areas will gain – a national formula will calculate the individual school’s need, and not just the area in which they’re based.

W h y i s o u r s c h o o l f u n d i n g syst e m s o c o m p l i cat e d ?S c h o o l f u n d i n g i s u n f a i r, b u t u s e o f a n a t i o n a l f o r m u l a m a y a d d r e ss t h e p r o b l e m

A n At i o n A l fo r m u l A w i l l cA lc u l At e t h e i n d i v i d uA l s c h o o l’ s n e e d

Jonathan Simons head of education at think tank Policy Exchange

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teachers, is that school funding has simply not kept pace with inflation.

Research from the Institute of Fiscal Studies shows that while the Conservative government has protected day-to-day spending per pupil in cash terms for the current parliament, rising costs and an increase in pupil numbers have squeezed resources. In real terms, the institute says, spending per pupil is likely to fall by 8% over five years.

The major factors are ones affecting all schools, from early years providers through to sixth-form colleges: an increase in employers’ contributions to the teachers’ pension scheme from April 2015, an average public sector pay rise of 1% per year announced in summer 2015 and an increase in employers’ national insurance contributions from April 2016.

At George Green’s, that added up to a total bill of £600,000 this year, half of which was saved through staff job cuts. More savings have had to be made by merging faculties and by cutting planned building works, and almost 20 staff have agreed to work for less money.

“As a head teacher I found it incredibly

i fo u n d i t i n c r e d i b ly pa i n f u l to say : ‘ i ’ m g o i n g to h av e to m a k e m a n y o f yo u r e d u n da n t ’

t he end of this year’s summer term was a difficult time for staff at George Green’s school, on London’s Isle of

Dogs. “We’d never had so many goodbye speeches … it was heartbreaking,” says the 1,200-pupil secondary school’s principal, Jill Baker.

Amid tightening budgets, the school was forced to cut 30 support staff roles this year out of a total of 100 – 18 of those through redundancies.

And George Green’s is not alone. Across the country, headteachers are complaining that they can’t make ends meet. Headlines have screamed of cuts, redundancies and deficits, and in some areas teachers have threatened to strike.

At times of austerity, budgets are bound to be difficult for schools. But last autumn’s spending review seemed to provide some comfort for heads and teachers.

“Not only is the schools budget protected in real terms, but the total financial support for education, including childcare and our extended further and higher education loans, will increase by £10bn,” the then chancellor, George Osborne, told MPs.

But the reality, it seems, is rather different from the political rhetoric. And the recent experience of George Green’s can provide some answers as to why that is.

The school’s pupils, aged 11-19, have a huge range of problems – almost eight out of 10 take free school meals; there’s a family therapist and a safeguarding team on site and a significant proportion have profound physical and educational special needs.

Many heads would envy Baker her budgets – George Green’s has just short of £7,800 per pupil to spend, plus a substantial sum of pupil premium money, which is designed to help raise standards in disadvantaged areas.

So why is the school facing such painful decisions while the politicians have been making all the right noises?

The truth, according to a wide range of organisations representing schools and

ca n s c h o o ls h i t t h e i r b u d g e ts ?

I n s p i t e o f p o l i t i c a l a s s u r a n c e s , f u n d i n g d i s c r e p a n c i e s m e a n s c h o o l s a r e st i l l f a c i n g t o u g h d e c i s i o n s o n h o w t o b a l a n c e t h e b o o k s . Fr a n A b r a m s r e p o r t s

painful to have to stand up in front of my staff and say: ‘I’m going to have to make many of you redundant,’” Baker says. “Many of those staff went to this school, and many were family members of pupils.”

And yet Baker’s school is better off than many: it is in Tower Hamlets, which is – with the exception of the City of London, which has just one 200-pupil primary school within its boundary – the highest-funded local authority (LA) in the country.

That means that while schools in the inner-London borough receive more than £7,000 per pupil per year, those in some other areas receive not much more than £4,000 to do the same job.

This discrepancy has been the subject of comment and debate over many years, and just about everyone agrees something needs to change. The reasons for it are largely historical and often have little to do with today’s realities, according to experts.

Until 10 years ago, the money given by the government to LAs for schools’ funding was based on a complex system of needs, taking into account factors such as deprivation, ethnicity and population density. In 2006-07 the

Labour government decided to introduce a national per-pupil grant to each area – based on what the area had spent per pupil during the 2005-06 school year.

And in effect, the system has been set in aspic ever since. Social, economic and demographic changes during the last decade have had little effect on schools’ funding in the areas where they have taken place. And the funding discrepancies between areas that existed then still exist now. Academies receive funding centrally, but the amount they get is based on the funding paid in their LA areas.

According to Malcolm Trobe, interim general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, the combination of these historical differences with today’s local decision-making in 152 English authorities has left schools in an unfair situation. “There were 150 different formulas incorporating lots of different factors,” he says. “So now you still have 150 different ways of distributing money, which is not equitably distributed in the first place. At the moment you can be up to £400 per pupil better or worse off than a virtually identical school. If

George Green’s School

t i m e l i n e

George Osborne says the government will introduce a national funding formula for schools to iron out the big

differences in financial support between regions.

JUNE 2013

AUtUmN 2016 A second consultation

on the national funding formula is due to be launched.

2014

2015

2016

OCtOBER 2015111 MPs, including former

education committee chair Graham Stuart, write to David Cameron asking for reform to the school

funding system.

mARCH 2016The government launches a

consultation on proposals for a new national school funding

formula. The proposals suggest that local authorities will no longer

determine how much funding schools are allocated.  

Later in the month, an additional £500m investment is promised to

help build a fairer school funding system.

JULY 2016Education secretary Justine

Greening announces that the overhaul of school funding in England will be delayed until

at least 2018.

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you put that into a big comprehensive with 1,250 pupils, that’s £500,000 per year.”

The government has promised to introduce changes, which should help to iron out some of these problems. And as part of the process of moving towards a fairer system, it gave an additional £390m to the lowest-funded areas in 2015-16.

In March this year the then education secretary, Nicky Morgan, proposed a national funding formula that would include a basic amount per pupil, as well as additional sums reflecting pupil characteristics and school and area costs. But in July the new education secretary, Justine Greening, announced that the planned reform would be delayed by a year until 2018-19.

F e e l i n g t h e p i n c h

This, according to Trobe, leaves many schools facing difficult decisions after four years in which funding has not taken inflation into account: “By now most schools will have looked at cutting the cost of things like utilities – they will have pared down their contracts for services as much as they can. They’re beginning to find there isn’t much more they can save on their non-staff costs, which are typically about 20% of their budgets. So now most people are finding they are now looking at cutting staff costs.”

And while schools like George Green’s are feeling the pinch, others have far less to cut. Peter Woodman is headteacher of The Weald community school and sixth form in West Sussex. This is the lowest-funded county in England – four non-county authorities do slightly better. Its schools receive just under £4,200 per pupil per year. “The bottom line is, why are children in West Sussex worth that much less than children in other parts of the country?” Woodman asks. “This is not what a fair and just system looks like – we wouldn’t want to deny schools in London, but the disparity is huge.

F u n d i n g Fo r s i x t h Fo r m

“There’s a limit to the number of things you can do to fill in the gaps. You can cut courses, and you can make classes bigger. We’ve taken more students into year 7 without increasing the number of classes.”

Another issue faced by The Weald, along with many other 11-18 schools, is sixth-form funding. Sixth forms are already funded through a national formula, but teachers’ organisations argue that, with a base rate of just £4,000 per pupil, the level is just too low. “In the western part of our county there’s nowhere now that does A-level German,” Woodman says. “It costs a quarter of a million pounds to run our

t h e b ot to m l i n e i s , w h y a r e c h i l d r e n i n w est s u s s e x wo rt h t h at m u c h l es s t h a n c h i l d r e n i n ot h e r pa rts o f t h e c o u n t ry ?

sixth form. We used to subsidise the 11-16s from the money we had for sixth form; we can’t do that now.”

At Woodman’s school, with 300 sixth formers among its 1,600 pupils, this means funding must be diverted from younger age groups to help make up the deficit.

With plans afoot for a national funding formula, his school decided this year to run a deficit of £180,000 – on the basis that the changes would mean a redistribution and extra money next year. Now with the plans delayed, West Sussex’s secondaries are left adrift – and are lobbying ministers for transitional funding to help them over the coming months. “We thought our funding per pupil would go up and so we decided we would live on our reserves for a year and it would be fine. But now that’s not going to happen. We planned strategically, and then they changed the ground rules.”

In primary schools, the issues are rather different. While secondaries have been hit hard, they tend to be larger and to have bigger budgets – and that does give them a certain amount of flexibility. Even big primary schools have less to play with.

In Harrow, on the outer edge of London, Anne Lyons has been a head for 20 years. Her school, the St John Fisher Catholic

Peter Woodman, headteacher, speaks to pupils at the Weald Community

School and Sixth Form, Billingshurst, West Sussex

primary, has expanded and is expected soon to have 650 pupils in an area where few parents are on benefits but where many work on low wages and need support from the school. Lyons has seen budgets – and results – rise in recent years but is now facing the prospect of a retreat.

“At one point we had 39 or 40 pupils in a class with one teacher – would you believe it?” she says. “But things were very different then. We had a much narrower curriculum; we didn’t have computers.

“Then we moved to a situation where not long ago it would have been a teacher with a class of 30 plus a teaching assistant (TA) for each class, or maybe for two classes. Now that’s reducing again. We can’t have TAs or general support; they’re there to help specific children. That’s because of budgets.”

The cost of national insurance and pension contribution rises at her school amounts to £50,000 on a £2m budget. And the prospect of a national funding formula is not greeted with such joy here as in western counties such as West Sussex. Lyons fears there may have to be job cuts, and that areas such as the arts, music and sport – all strong in her well-regarded school – will be adversely affected.

“Our concerns are that there’s going to be less money,” she says. “London does well in terms of attainment and progress, and that’s because the money we’ve had has been spent wisely. Our worry is that we’re going to end up with a race to the bottom, rather than everywhere else being funded in the same way that London has been in recent years.”

d i F F i c u lt d ec i s i o n s to m a k e

Last autumn the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT) surveyed more than 1,000 school leaders about budgets; eight out of 10 were in primaries. It found almost two thirds had balanced their budgets only by making significant cuts or using surpluses, and 7% had already set a deficit budget. Almost half had cut the numbers or hours of TAs, and a similar proportion thought their budgets would be untenable by 2017-18.

Valentine Mulholland, the NAHT’s head of policy, says primary schools are making difficult decisions: “Some of those decisions involve not investing in property, having to delay repairs, reducing TAs or having to increase class sizes,” she says.

The Department for Education says it

w h at facto r s d e t e r m i n e h ow m u c h a s c h o o l g e ts ?Schools will probably get a basic per pupil amount,

and three extra components:

e x t r a f u n d i n g fo r d e p r i vat i o n o r fo r lo w at ta i n m e n t

m o n e y fo r ‘ s c h o o l c o sts ’ to r e f l ect p r e m i s es c o sts

a s p ec i a l p ot fo r g eo g r a p h i c c o sts . t h i s m i g h t i n c lu d e e x t r a h e l p fo r s m a l l , r u r a l s c h o o l s , o r t h o s e i n a r e as o f h i g h c o st

wants a system that’s fair for everyone, regardless of background. “We want all schools to have access to the resources they need, so that every pupil, regardless of background or ability, can reach their full potential. That’s why we have protected the schools budget so that, as pupil numbers increase, so will the amount of money for our schools – in 2016-17 that will total over £40bn, the highest on record,” said a spokesperson. “We are firmly committed to introducing a national funding formula so that all schools are funded fairly – both to address the historic unfairness in the system and also so that areas with the highest need attract the most funding.”

In Tower Hamlets, George Green’s Jill Baker is clear that heads in some other areas face a hard task in balancing their books. “I don’t doubt that head teachers in less-funded authorities need more,” she says. “The whole funding system needs looking at, and there’s a definite need for a fairer system. But what mustn’t get forgotten is that schools which are serving poor communities need more money just to function efficiently. Some schools simply have a greater level of need – even though we have a high per-pupil income, we are not rolling in money.”

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Ed u c a t i o n s e c r e t a r y J u st i n e G r e e n i n g h a s d e s c r i b e d t h e p l a n n e d o v e r h a u l o f s c h o o l f u n d i n g a s ‘ a o n c e - i n - a -g e n e r a t i o n o p p o r t u n i t y ’ . A b b y Yo u n g - Po w e l l a s k s s c h o o l l e a d e rs w h a t t h e y ’ r e h o p i n g f o r

W h at d o s c h o o l l e a d e r s Wa n t f r o m a n e W f u n d i n g fo r m u l a ?

What we need is to make things fairer, and ironically, the new funding formula won’t do that because there’s no extra money. It’s going to take away from my kids, who are already deprived.

Rural areas often don’t have the same issues we have in some cities, or have them in the same magnitude. I’m not saying there aren’t mental health issues, or deprivation, everywhere. But it’s really condensed where I am, so we need the money we get. And I know what I’m talking about – I’ve worked in authorities that don’t get enough support. I once had a classroom in a Portacabin which had ivy growing up the electrical cable to the lightswitch, so I had to turn it on with a rubber, just in case the whole thing went. I know how bad it is. But you don’t have to be Robin Hood and steal from the supposed rich to give to the poor.

daniel moynihan

chief executive of the harris federation, which has schools in london

Keziah featherstone

headteacher at Bridge learning campus, Bristol

o p i n i o n

I want the new school funding formula to maintain the level of funding that we currently get, including the additional amounts that cover London salary costs. Some of our students need additional

annie gammon

headteacher at stoKe newington school, in hacKney, london, one of the Best funded areas in the country

I want it to be implemented quickly. The sooner the better. We’ve been promised it for years – I’ve been a headteacher for just over a decade and for most of that time we’ve been promised fairer distribution of funding. So get on with it, because we need it. I’m not saying throwing money at a school solves all of its problems, because it’s not as simple as that. But, my god, it helps.

david ellis

headteacher at yorK high school, north yorKshire, which receives less funding than elsewhere in the country

There needs to be something to make sure smaller schools aren’t having to face budget cuts year-on-year just because they are small. Previously small schools got a grant, which meant there was a little top up. But that’s gone. And my concern is that schools might be forced to join multi-academy trusts, purely because they can’t afford to keep going as they are.

We are a relatively small, full, school and a lot of funding is based on pupil numbers. Because we don’t have high numbers of children and we’re not in an area that suffers from high social deprivation, we attract very little extra funding.

david dunn

headteacher at pedmore primary school, west midlands

david hermitt

chief executive of congleton multi-academy trust and chair of the cheshire east schools’ forum

T h e c u r r e n T fo r m u l a i s u n fa i r a n d i ’ m f r u sT r aT e d a b o u T T h e d e l ays i n c h a n g i n g i T

We were told that the government would support the poorest-funded local authorities until the new formula is in place. I want to know if that will still happen. The current formula is unfair and I’m frustrated about the delays in changing it. Too many schools have suffered from less funding per head, for no logical reason.

In rural Cheshire east, which is one of the most poorly funded areas of England, we have had to increase class sizes and the contact time for teachers, while reducing the amount spent on books and computers, just so that we can remain within budget. In other schools in the area, headteachers and governors have had to make drastic cuts, and lose staff.

Some sort of cushioning over time, while a new formula is implemented, would be really, really useful. Ideally there would be a transition period, maybe five years or more, where there’s absolute clarity given in advance as to how costs will move. And then schools can plan for it. That would be the single biggest thing governments can do to help.

But the real question is, will any government be brave enough to actually implement a new funding formula? Because, although the current system is unfair, the people crying out about that unfairness are not as loud as those that will be when there’s a new set of winners and losers. So it will take a brave administration to introduce it.

support, for instance students who have English as a second language, or who are disadvantaged. Helping them costs money. So I’m looking for a formula that covers that.

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H ow ca n s c H o o ls m a k e t H e m o st o f t H e p u p i l p r e m i u m ?W i t h O f st e d m o n i t o r i n g t h e a t t a i n m e n t o f p u p i l s w h o r e c e i v e p u p i l p r e m i u m f u n d i n g , L o u i s e T i c k l e f i n d s o u t w h a t s c h o o l s c a n d o t o a c h i e v e t h e m o st e f f e c t i v e i n t e r v e n t i o n

p upil premium is a precious resource for headteachers in these cash-strapped times – it’s money that’s

not ringfenced and can be spent at the discretion of the school. In November last year the government pledged to protect it for this parliament.

But pupil premium money comes with an important condition attached: the attainment of children who attract pupil premium must improve as a result of how the cash is spent. If it doesn’t, the governing body will face the ire of Ofsted at the next inspection.

In a recent white paper, the government declared that it wanted to improve the effectiveness of pupil premium spending allocated to students who claim free school meals. The pressure is now firmly on schools to show that the most vulnerable and disadvantaged pupils are achieving and benefiting from this funding.

This might be quite a challenge in some settings. Marc Rowland, director of the National Education Trust and author of A practical Guide to the Pupil Premium, says the focus should not be on ad hoc spending. “We shouldn’t start with questions about what the money is used for. We should start by taking a big step back and looking at what is a good strategy for raising attainment.”

So where can school leaders and governors look for guidance?

D o n ’ t lu m p a l l st u D e n ts to g e t H e r

While some disadvantages affecting children who attract pupil premium will be universally familiar, schools must dig deep to discover the particular needs of their school’s poorest children before spending decisions are made, says Rowland.

“It’s mistake is to group all pupil premium pupils together,” agrees James Richardson, senior analyst at the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF).

“Some will be achieving at expected levels, some will be exceeding them, they’ll have different strengths and weaknesses. People assume that pupil premium funding is used for interventions such as summer schools, catch-up sessions and one-to-one

teaching. But the core of pupil premium should be around the quality of teaching and learning in the classroom.”

Another question is: are disadvantaged pupils spending a lot of time being taught by teaching assistants (TAs), compared with their more fortunate peers? “This isn’t TA bashing,” says Rowland. “It’s about recognising that the most vulnerable children need the most expert professional teaching skills available.”

Governors also need to focus on the children’s needs, Rowland observes, not on league tables. “Is pupil premium money being spent to meet disadvantaged students’ needs, or is it being focused on helping the school meet its accountability targets?” he asks. “When pupil premium was first introduced, you’d see spikes of spending in years 5 and 6, and in year 10, so it’s worth looking to see if money is spent evenly throughout the school.”

t H i n k a b o u t i m pact

The EEF has created a pupil premium toolkit to help schools decide how to spend money. There is a very telling graphic in the presentation on the toolkit that maps the cost of the intervention against its effectiveness.

It is instantly apparent that immediate feedback in the classroom comes top for impact. This strategy is also among the lowest for cost. “Yet very few schools recognise or do it,” says Richardson. The research shows that pupil premium works very hard indeed when it’s invested in excellent teaching and professional development. “It’s important to get these things right first,” he says, “rather than spending it on clubs and school trips.”

e x t r ac u r r i c u l a r s p e n D i n g

Karen Wespieser, a governor at a junior school in Maidenhead, which has relatively high pupil premium numbers, says that promoting cultural and other extracurricular activities makes a real difference to children. “It’s not just about the quality of the teaching – it’s about inclusion and quality of access,” she says.

There is a pupil premium lead governor Get

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who meets every term with the deputy head, and the curriculum and staffing committee, on which Wespieser sits, regularly asks detailed questions about the needs, progress and composition of pupil premium cohorts. “We will want to know, for instance, if pupil premium students in one year are doing any better at closing the gap than another [and] why that’s happening,” she explains.

“We did have to ask quite specifically for a list of interventions, because there are quite a lot being used – and so understanding what the pupil premium goes towards, and the proportions, can be quite complex. We are seeing a narrowing of the gap in the majority of the cohort, but not enough. We’re not moving as fast as some schools.”

Information service The Key has published articles and helpful links for governors interested in the use of pupil premium in boosting pastoral care, as well as on what Ofsted will want from a school when accounting for this spend.

The NGA’s Allcroft believes it is entirely valid to use pupil premium money “to extend students’ cultural capital with things like theatre or outdoor pursuits”. It is, she concedes, difficult to show the immediate impact, “but longer term, it will make a difference. Some things that are important are very hard to measure.”

J u st i f y i n g s p e n D i n g

Some of the most effective uses of pupil premium can be the most subtle, “and that can be very challenging to justify”, acknowledges Rowland. “As a head, you might decide to appoint a candidate who is very experienced and more expensive, for instance.” As long as that appointment is made with a focus on the needs of disadvantaged children, this is an appropriate use of the money, he says – and it would be good practice for heads to discuss this with their governing body.

What governors should aim for, suggests Richardson, “is challenging and asking for the evidence behind particular strategies”. This is where the EEF toolkit comes into its own: at the bottom of each intervention-and-evidence section are questions governors can use to draw out the rationale and results of its use in their school.

Decisions on this spending should be part of a plan for the entire school, though with a tight focus on the needs of the most vulnerable children. “Pupil premium isn’t just a bolt-on,” says Richardson, “though because of the separate accountability aspect, people think it is.”

S o m e o f t h e m o St e f f ect i v e u S eS o f p u p i l p r e m i u m ca n b e t h e m o St S u b t l e

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1 3

Schools in rural areas are often the worst funded and many are desperate for the government to shake up the school

funding system. They’re struggling to make ends meet and hope that a new funding formula could bring a boost in cash.

But not everyone is eager for change. Schools in London and other cities – which are currently the best funded – are awaiting the changes with dread. Many expect to lose money. They also have little certainly as to how great the cuts will be, or how long they’ll have to adjust to the changes.

Councillor Nick Small, assistant mayor for education, employment and skills in Liverpool, says that modelling by the council shows the worst-case scenario is a cut of £20m: “Our schools are run really efficiently. There’s not much scope, if any, to make these kinds of savings without it affecting the frontline and teaching and learning.” Liverpool raises only 10% of its total £1.3bn funding through council tax, because of its low property values, making it dependent on the government grant that is being cut by 58% from 2010 to 2017.

At the moment, headteachers warn that they are operating in the dark. No one knows how big the cuts will be or how schools will be helped to prepare for them.

Currently, school budgets are protected by a minimum funding guarantee, which means that no school will lose more than 1.5% of funding per pupil in a single year. The government has said the guarantee will continue, but not whether it will remain at 1.5%. The proposals also mooted an Invest to Save fund to help schools manage the transition, to be spent on financial, legal and HR advice, or retraining, but there is as yet no detail on the size of the fund or how it will work.

This lack of clarity is making it difficult for schools to plan ahead, says Natalie Perera, executive director of the thinktank CentreForum: “If schools know what their end budget will be and how quickly they will lose that money, they will be able to plan for the redundancies they make, if any, and in the case of a secondary school, whether they need to drop a subject or a department, but without knowing that, it becomes really difficult.”

Rob Hull, vice-chair of the Islington Schools Forum, also has concerns. Local authorities’ rich local knowledge, which enables them to use discretion in the allocation of funds, can’t be emulated by national government, he argues. Islington, for example, has been able to divert extra funds to help schools deal with sudden influxes of immigrants by enabling them to learn the language.

In the new model, a portion of the per-pupil funding will be allocated according to deprivation, which will be determined partly by postcode. While this will work well in parts of the country, Hull says they make no sense in an area such as Islington, where rich owner-occupiers live next door to people in social housing.

He also argues that, when it comes to extra funding for deprived pupils, the government may underestimate the effects of “concentrated deprivation”, such as a higher number of pupils with English as an additional language: “When you’ve got one child in a class from a deprived background, that child, through being with its peers, can cope better, and needs less support than if you’ve got a majority of such children in the classroom,” says Hull.

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1 51 4

5. Hammersmith £6,351and Fulham

5. Cheshire East £4,206

1. Tower Hamlets £6,982

1. Wokingham £4,166

2. Hackney £6,858

2. Poole £4,187

3. Lambeth £6,486

3. West Sussex £4,198

4. Southwark £6,463

4. York £4,201

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£ 4 , 1 8 7

£ 4 , 3 0 2

£ 4 , 7 5 5

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£ 4 , 4 5 2

£ 4 , 1 6 6

£ 4 , 1 9 8

£ 6 , 9 8 2

£ 4 , 2 0 6

£ 4 , 2 0 1

£ 5 , 2 1 8

£ 5 , 0 6 4£ 5 , 1 5 8

£ 4 , 4 74

£ 4 , 3 9 2

£ 4 , 5 3 9

E N G L A N D

Wokingham £4,166Poole £4,187West Sussex £4,198York £4,201Cheshire East £4,206South Gloucestershire £4,214Trafford £4,227Stockport £4,229Dorset £4,232Leicestershire £4,238Rutland £4,243Warrington £4,244Swindon £4,248Bournemouth £4,251Cambridgeshire £4,257Hampshire £4,269Solihull £4,274Bracknell Forest £4,284Central Bedfordshire £4,294Warwickshire £4,298East Riding of Yorkshire £4,300Surrey £4,302Wiltshire £4,302Buckinghamshire £4,303Staffordshire £4,309North Somerset £4,313Worcestershire £4,318Oxfordshire £4,319Northamptonshire £4,321Somerset £4,343Cheshire West and Chester £4,345Devon £4,346Nottinghamshire £4,355Gloucestershire £4,357Bath and North East Somerset £4,358Medway £4,358West Berkshire £4,368Suffolk £4,371Lincolnshire £4,374Kent £4,383Plymouth £4,387Essex £4,392Hertfordshire £4,397Shropshire £4,402Torbay £4,405Derbyshire £4,409Bury £4,434East Sussex £4,444Calderdale £4,447Herefordshire £4,447Milton Keynes £4,448

Sheffield £4,449Brighton and Hove £4,451Dudley £4,452Sefton £4,452St Helens £4,456Telford and Wrekin £4,456Thurrock £4,459North Yorkshire £4,465Cornwall £4,467Windsor and Maidenhead £4,468Barnsley £4,474North Lincolnshire £4,475Stockton-on-Tees £4,481Lancashire £4,482Bedford £4,500Reading £4,503Richmond upon Thames £4,503Norfolk £4,511Darlington £4,520Sunderland £4,523North Tyneside £4,529Doncaster £4,530Wigan £4,531Wirral £4,533Blackpool £4,534Derby £4,534Bolton £4,539Isle of Wight £4,539Northumberland £4,545Leeds £4,546Bromley £4,548Gateshead £4,552Wakefield £4,570Cumbria £4,574Peterborough £4,575Portsmouth £4,588Kingston upon Thames £4,594Southend-on-Sea £4,594Stoke-on-Trent £4,622Redcar and Cleveland £4,625Bexley £4,635Kirklees £4,641Southampton £4,646Durham £4,649North East Lincolnshire £4,656Walsall £4,662Salford £4,664Sutton £4,670Blackburn with Darwen £4,681Hartlepool £4,695Leicester £4,697

Rochdale £4,700Tameside £4,710Kingston upon Hull £4,716Newcastle upon Tyne £4,717Havering £4,729South Tyneside £4,742Bristol £4,755Oldham £4,780Redbridge £4,796Sandwell £4,803Wolverhampton £4,821Knowsley £4,832 Slough £4,836Rotherham £4,837Luton £4,845Croydon £4,856Coventry £4,861Halton £4,864Bradford £4,869Hillingdon £4,873Merton £4,904Harrow £4,912Middlesbrough £4,919Barnet £5,024Liverpool £5,064Manchester £5,158Hounslow £5,198Enfield £5,204Birmingham £5,218Waltham Forest £5,230Ealing £5,298Nottingham £5,329Brent £5,394Barking and Dagenham £5,578Wandsworth £5,602Haringey £5,913Lewisham £5,966Kensington and Chelsea £5,987Greenwich £6,020Westminster £6,020Newham £6,127Islington £6,221Camden £6,233Hammersmith and Fulham £6,351Southwark £6,463Lambeth £6,486Hackney £6,858Tower Hamlets £6,982City of London £8,587

The amount of school funding for local authorities across England varies hugely – some get thousands of pounds more per pupil than others. Here’s a breakdown of the figures, from top to bottom

LocaL authoritY

Rural shire counties tend to receive the least per-pupil funding. Headteachers in these areas are calling for a speedy roll out of a new funding formula

London boroughs dominate the best funded areas of the country. This list excludes City of London, which receives £8,587 per pupil but which is not comparable due to its very small number of state-funded schools

f u n d i n g i n e n g l a n d : t h e h i g h s a n d low s

tower hamlets, London

Manchester

Liverppool

Bristol

Barnsley

isle of White

birminghamDudley

York

Wokingham

Poole

Cheshire East

Oxfordshire

Wiltshire

West sussex

Essex

Pe r - p u p i l f u n d i n g f o r l o c a l a u t h o r i t i e s a c r o ss e n g l a n d 2 0 1 6 - 2 0 1 7 Figures have been rounded to the nearest pound. Source: Department for Education

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Page 11: Finding the Formula - UK | Zurich Insurance · Finding the Formula A comprehensive guide to school funding. 2 03 ... (and MPs). At the moment it’s ... funding discrepancies mean

Zurich Municipal is a trading name of Zurich Insurance plc. Zurich Insurance plc is authorised by the Central Bank of Ireland and subject to limited regulation by the Financial Conduct Authority. Details about the extent of our regulation by the Financial Conduct Authority are available from us on request.

MAKING THE RIGHT CHOICE FOR YOUR SCHOOLThe purpose of this book is to examine and explore the changes to the school funding formula and what challenges and opportunities this presents for schools across the country.

We recognise this as the biggest risk to schools today.

2016 so far has been a year of unexpected change for the UK, with a significant part of this focussed on the education sector. We are proud to have worked with The Guardian, Policy Exchange and school representatives to provide some clarity and context to such an important subject.

We hope that you find this information useful and of interest and if you would like to get in touch to discuss this book, or your insurance and risk management requirements please contact us at [email protected]

Tilden Watson Head of Education, Zurich Municipal.

To access our latest thought leadership and risk insight visit newsandviews.zurich.co.uk

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