On 1 April, a new national funding formula came into being.

We have to recognise that there’s much to welcome about this revolution. That we got here at all after years of attempts and false starts and governments losing their nerve is pretty impressive.

But there won’t be many school leaders around the country celebrating. There are still plenty of them, and parents and governors and others, willing to remain at the barricades.

The 18th-century French cry of “liberté, égalité, fraternité” could well be modified for 2018 to “équité, transparence, suffisance” - “equity, transparency, sufficiency”.

These are the three essential elements of a successful national funding formula. Without all three together, we cannot hope for a formula that will deliver the fairness that everyone has craved for so long.

We’re making progress on a more equitable system - and that is cause for genuine celebration. We now have a national calculation for allocating funding to local authorities, based on their latest pupil data, rather than what their population looked like 10 years ago, and trying to take into account the levels of deprivation and challenge that their schools are facing. But we must have more transparency in how that is then allocated to schools, and we undoubtedly need the government to recognise that the current pot of money for schools is insufficient.

It’s a strong start, you might say. And for now, that’s probably true. We have to keep moving forward towards that goal of the proper national funding formula that was intended.

But NAHT was very disappointed to see that whilst the formula will calculate what each school should get based on its characteristics, for now, the funding will still go to the local authority to determine how to allocate it according to its own criteria - the so-called “soft formula”.

Councils could undermine the formula

This is where things start to fall apart. The national equity and transparency intended by the formula could be diluted and undermined by 152 local authority variations.

We will have NAHT members not seeing the minimum funding of £3,300 for a primary school place or £4,600 for a secondary one; we will have members seeing their funding cut compared with last year, rather than seeing the minimum 0.5 per cent increase allocated by the government. And we will have a system that might be a bit fairer, but still won’t be transparent or sufficient enough to meet rising costs and growing needs.

To its credit, the government has indicated its intention to move to a “hard formula” going directly to schools from 2020, but there’s a lot that could happen before then and schools urgently need guarantees. It is totally unrealistic to ask school leaders to plan efficiently and effectively for the long term if they have no information about what will happen in as little as two years’ time.

School funding is still in crisis, reeling from the real-terms cuts estimated at 8.8 per cent since April 2015.

All schools need significant increases in funding and as they fail to materialise, some school leaders could believe that the formula is the problem. The formula can create more transparency and consistency in how the education budget is allocated, but it can’t make up for the fact that the education budget is just not keeping up with massive increases in costs.

In many ways, at a time of funding crisis, it’s even more important that the scarce resources are allocated to meet the greatest need, and at a national level, the formula achieves this - the problem is that this gets lost in translation at a local authority level.

We mustn’t forget that there is a second formula at work here. The new high-needs funding formula allocates funding to local authorities in a way that uses much better proxies to assess how likely a local authority is to be facing larger or lesser levels of demand for high-needs funding for pupils with SEND.

Unfortunately, this also exposes the inadequate funding levels. For instance, local authorities like Kirklees and Sunderland, which under the formula could be getting around 20 per cent more high-needs funding to meet the needs of their pupils, will be restricted by the 3 per cent cap on gains a year.

‘Impossible decisions’ on high-needs funding

Local authorities are having to make impossible decisions about high-needs funding, and schools and families are seeing cuts to the support for our most vulnerable pupils. Mainstream schools are finding it ever harder to support pupils with SEND as local authority services and support are cut, and special schools are struggling to meet the demand for places so that children are having to travel ever further to school or wait months for a school place.

A national funding formula has been a policy goal for NAHT for decades and we should reflect and congratulate the government on having taken some important first steps to creating greater equity and transparency in school funding.

But we are not there yet.

We’ve made progress on getting to an equal system of sharing out the funds. But with school and local authority budgets pushed to breaking point by increased demands and rising costs, we need transparency and sufficiency to complete the revolution.

Valentine Mulholland is the head of policy at the NAHT headteachers’ union

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