Agenda item

David Gearing

The Central Schools Services Block 2021-22

The table below shows the final position for the CSSB in 2021-22 and replaces the estimated picture showing in the Forum minutes of 27^th November 2020.

The Dedicated Schools Grant settlement figures for 2021-22 were released a couple of weeks after the November Schools Forum meeting. For the record the summary figures below show the 2021-22 funding blocks compared to their 2020-21 equivalents.

The Schools Block increase includes £13.58m of former Teachers Pay Grant and Teachers Pension Employer Contribution Grant funds moved into the Dedicated Schools Grant. The underlying increase in funding for schools is £8.72m which represents a 2.88% increase on the previous year.

The Growth addition supports the operation of a Pupil Growth Fund and is also being used to allocate further funds to secondary schools and academies which agree to admit additional pupils at the request of the local authority to address higher levels of demand for school places as the local birth bulge works through into the secondary years.

The High Needs Block increase should be viewed in the context of significant pressures in the High Needs account. An overspend in excess of £20m will have been accumulated by the close of the current financial year. The increase in High Needs funding will be helpful in slowing down the rate of accumulation of the deficit.

The Early Years Funding Block figure released in December is always an interim one and is revised in the New Year once January census data is available. Although the interim figure for 2021-22 shows a £0.66m increase compared to the equivalent release a year ago the confirmed 2021-22 figure could be quite different given the potential for the pandemic to have affected the numbers of children registering for early years provision.

The 2021-22 funding distribution to mainstream schools

Amongst the agenda papers today was a comparison of the schools funding allocation in 2021-22 with the equivalent figures in 2020-21.

The largest single difference between the two years lies within the Basic Entitlement (Age-Weighted Pupil Unit) funding factor – an additional £19.69m has been allocated in 2021-22 and that against a background of 197 fewer pupils in the new year. This accounts for a large proportion of the overall £22.3m funding increase. It should be remembered that the 2021-22 AWPU rates include the transfer in of former Teachers Pay and Pension Grant funds - £180 has been included in the Primary AWPU and £265 in both Secondary AWPUs in 2021-22.

£2.46m more has been allocated in 2021-22 across the deprivation-related factors, free school meals and IDACI (Income Deprivation Affecting Children Index), reflecting rising rates of socio-economic disadvantage.

The minimum per pupil funding levels that have to be satisfied have seen an increase in the number of schools (30 to 45) receiving top-up funding to meet those levels in 2021-22 at an increased cost of £1.73m in comparison to 2020-21.

A number of funding factors have exhibited reductions in the amount of allocated funds in 2021-22 – approaching £1m less has been allocated across the English as an additional language, pupil mobility, business rates, premises rents and lump sum factors. 

The 2021-22 funding allocation represents another significant step towards the National Funding Formula (NFF) in Kirklees. The 2020-21 distribution contained £10.6m of cash protection funding on top of the pure NFF factor value distribution. In 2021-22 the level of cash protection has fallen to £6.86m, which now sits wholly within the minimum funding guarantee factor, largely as a result of uplifts to the NFF factor values in 2021-22.

It was asked when the National Funding Formula will be fully imposed upon local authorities. The latest information indicates that schools will be directly funded by the NFF with effect from funding year 2022-23. However, the government has announced target dates for the change several times before without the change ever being made. The changeover to direct funding may raise fears amongst those schools in receipt of cash protection support through the minimum funding guarantee mechanism that that could disappear. That is unlikely to happen given how established the MFG is within schools funding arrangements and it may well assume even more significance in future for those schools within local authorities which are not as far along the path to adoption of the NFF structures.