Budget for Education?

Mr Hammond is set to announce an additional £320 million for free schools. He’s planning 140 new ones. That's £2.285 million each. The cost of 10 average homes. Seems a little on the low side to me. Building a school for up to 1500 pupils for under £3 million seems unrealistic. But then DfE forecasts on funding and financial sustainability are not very reliable. The National Audit Office (NAO) looked at financial sustainability of schools and how DfE is performing in their report published in December 2016.

Financial-sustainability-of-schools.pdf the NAO found:

“Between 2010-11 and 2014-15, the proportion of maintained secondary schools spending more than their income rose from 33.7% to 59.3%. The proportion in deficit was 15.0% in 2014-15 and the average size of deficit for those schools in deficit increased in real terms from £246,000 to £326,000. Between 2012/13 and 2014/15, the proportion of secondary academies spending more than their income rose from 38.8% to 60.6%.”

Don’t forget that free schools are academies, they are not a different class of school in terms of funding. A free school is an academy providing new places, an academy is an existing school which has converted to academy status.

The NAO also noted that “The definite part of the Department’s approach is that real-terms funding per pupil will drop over the coming years; the uncertain part is how schools are able to respond based on their particular circumstances. As a result, funding per pupil will, on average, rise only by 1.3% from £5,447 in 2015-16 to £5,519 in 2019-20”

Here in Somerset, our per pupil funding is about £3,275 compared to the £5,447 national average quoted by the NAO.

Crucially the NAO state “The Department compiles a list of future policy changes that it expects will affect schools but has no plans to assess the financial implications for schools of these changes. It does not therefore have assurance that its policies are affordable within current spending plans without adversely affecting educational outcomes. It leaves schools and multi-academy trusts to manage the consequences individually.”

The best news the NAO could offer was “the Department has guaranteed that no school will have the funding it receives through the local authority formula reduced by more than 1.5% per pupil for 2017-18.”

There was no similar statement for academies.

Here in our part of Somerset and the North Petherton Division in particular we need a new secondary school. The school needs to be built to serve the children of the North Petherton division, and not be aimed at Bridgwater children. That’s not to say Bridgwater doesn’t need additional quality capacity. The results for Robert Blake Science College last academic year need to be challenged. 29% of students attaining A* – C is not acceptable.

The government expects the secondary school population to increase by 10% in the next few years. This brings me back to £320 million for 140 new schools. Seems rather inadequate. And where is the funding for the schools already open?