If it’s the first week of October, then someone in your school office is probably already getting twitchy about census day later this week.

The pupil census collection is always important when it comes to school funding, infant free school meals and much more.

But this year’s has an added last-minute twist of the school-led tutoring debacle.

Never known for giving cash without strings attached, the Department for Education has made particularly certain the latest round of post-Covid funding is fiendishly complicated and comes with a clear warning that if you get it wrong, it’ll be clawing it back.

So what do heads - and business managers and bursars - need to know by Thursday?

School funding and the pupil census

Some schools might still have some unspent “catch-up premium” money from last year, which was fairly flexible for schools to use. 

For this academic year, we have two new pots of money: the “recovery premium” and “school-led tutoring” funds.

Both are calculated based on the number of pupils eligible for pupil premium, but both have different criteria attached.

1.   Recovery premium

The simpler pot is the recovery premium. This is essentially additional pupil premium funding - at the rate of £145 per PP-eligible pupil in mainstream schools.

The final details haven’t been published (despite first payments being made last week), but it appears that this should be spent like normal pupil premium funding, so not necessarily exclusively on disadvantaged pupils but certainly targeted that way.

2.   School-led tutoring

The rather more complex pot of funding is the school-led tutoring allowance.

This funding is strictly ringfenced for providing one-to-one or small group tuition and is the funding that can be clawed back if you make a mistake about how you account for it.

Firstly, let’s deal with the amount you get.

The funding is based on providing 15 hours of tuition for 60 per cent of your disadvantaged pupils - but is only intended to cover 75 per cent of the costs. And the DfE estimates that tuition comes at a cost of £18 per hour.

So a typical primary with 40 disadvantaged pupils would receive just under £5,000 in school-led tutoring money (24 pupils, being tutored for 15 hours each funded at £13.75 per hour (75 percent of the cost of £18)), while a secondary with 200 disadvantaged pupils can expect around £28,000.

How do we have to spend the money?

The school-led tutoring money must be used for tuition - either individually or in small groups - and should be targeted at, though not necessarily exclusively, disadvantaged pupils.

At the end of the school year, schools will have to account for how many hours of tuition have been provided, and if it falls short of the DfE expectations, the government will take back the difference.

At first glance, £18 per hour doesn’t sound like a particularly strong rate for tuition - particularly if you’re hoping to employ qualified teachers.

However, the guidance does allow for small group tuition, and recommends group sizes of three “to ensure cost-effectiveness”.

Schools can choose a mix of individual and small group rates, but must ensure that overall they provide tuition for enough pupils.

So, schools might consider it as rates of £36 or £54 for groups or two or three.

If employing qualified teachers, one option is to pay additional hours at their standard rate - but this doesn’t come in handy £18 multiples, which could lead to you being out of pocket if you over-spend compared with the £18 target rate.

Equally, if you spend less than £18 per pupil hour, then you must use the remaining funds on further tuition or risk it being taken back.

Alternatively, the new School Teachers’ Pay and Conditions Document, published on Friday, allows schools to award a fixed-term TLR3 payment for any member of staff involved in organising or delivering the school-led tutoring project outside of their normal hours.

With a bit of careful calculation from your business manager, you can make sure the allowance (with its on-costs) matches the overall funding allocation as closely as possible.

Who pays the other 25 per cent?

The school-led tutoring funding is based on the £18 hourly rate, but paid to schools at the rate of £13.50 per hour - that is, three-quarters of the cost.

Schools have to fund the remaining £4.50 per hour themselves. Many might choose to use the recovery premium funding to do this, for this academic year.

The school-led tutoring fund is intended to run for future academic years, but the DfE payment rate will drop to £10.80 next year, and then to just £4.50 in 2023-24.

As such, it would be useful to begin planning for how the additional costs might be met in future years - particularly as the recovery premium will not be in place after this year, and schools will still need to show that they’ve spent the full £18 hourly rate.

Who can do the tutoring?

You might choose to use your own teachers if they’re willing to work hours additional to their usual contracts, or to employ additional qualified teachers.

Alternatively, you might ask teaching assistants or other tutors to take on the role.

In these cases, though, they must complete an 11-hour online training course before they begin - and those costs are not covered by the tutoring funding.

This will also delay the start of your programme, as the course will not be available until November.

So, what has to be recorded on the census?

At this stage, quite possibly nothing.

There are two requirements for the accountability of the spending, with the most significant being the end-of-year return.

In the termly census collections, schools will just be reporting on what is already in place at each census point.

If you start tuition before Thursday - which you can only do if you’re using qualified teachers who don’t need to undertake the additional training - then you should list those pupils on the census using the “Funding and Monitoring” section of your management system.

But for many schools, this won’t have started yet, and so at this stage, there is nothing new to enter.

By the spring term census in January, many will have started tutoring, and at this stage schools must note each pupil who has been taking part in tutoring funded by this pot, and also how many hours they’ve had thus far.

This will be repeated again in May.

The key form, though, for ensuring that funding is not lost, will be the Education and Skills Funding Agency form to be completed by the end of July 2022.

This form will ask schools to outline how many hours of tuition have been provided, and at what overall cost.

By this point, it will be key that schools and trusts can show that they have delivered at least the minimum number of hours’ tuition suggested by the original funding allocation.

In short, there’s no need to panic quite yet.

If you’ve not decided who you are going to offer the tutoring to, then there is nothing to be recorded on this month’s census.

But it would be a good time to start thinking about how you’re going to allocate the funding - and find the 25 per cent top-up, so that by January you have some names in mind, and hopefully even some tutoring hours under their belts.

Michael Tidd is headteacher at East Preston Junior School, in West Sussex