Half of an extra £40 million hardship fund announced as part of the teacher pay deal over the summer will go to 35 local authorities with maintained schools with the biggest deficits, the Department for Education has said today.
Local authorities will get a share of the £20 million pot if they “have aggregated school-level deficits as a proportion of their total maintained schools’ income above 1 per cent”, the DfE said in guidance published this morning.
The other half of the extra hardship fund will be used to top up existing financial support available to academies through the Education, Skills and Funding Agency (ESFA), the government said.
Support received is in proportion to each local authority’s school-level deficit.
Three of the 35 local authorities - North Tyneside, Liverpool and Worcestershire - are set to receive over £1 million for this academic year.
The one-off funding is separate from the money schools will be getting through the teachers’ pay additional grant, and the DfE has said it has no plans for similar funding in the next academic year.
Local authorities will have “significant flexibility” in how best to use the money, the DfE said, adding that it can be used for maintained mainstream schools of all phases, maintained special schools, pupil referral units and maintained nursery schools.
The DfE said that if a local authority doesn’t allocate all the funding they’re given, they can carry it over to 2024-25, and said that schools can add any unspent cash at the end of the year to their reserves.
Union leaders called on the government to publish more information on the hardship fund a few weeks after it was first announced.
The money was always set to come through existing funding routes - local authorities or, for academies, from the ESFA - but criteria had not been published previously.
The full list of local authority allocations is as follows:
- Liverpool - £1,741,291.50
- North Tyneside - £1,868,147.92
- Worcestershire - £1,563,479.89
- North Yorkshire - £972,188.39
- Enfield - £965,741.96
- Lambeth - £959,277.21
- Bradford - £934,212.12
- Southampton - £559,332.03
- Bristol, City of - £675,992.45
- South Tyneside - £605,844.96
- County Durham - £582,480.41
- Greenwich - £554,688.45
- Southwark - £516,380.60
- Sheffield - £517,960.04
- Isle of Wight - £517,146.08
- Hillingdon - £491,623.25
- Leicester - £422,217.56
- Lewisham - £458,226.44
- Wiltshire - £405,502.97
- Cumberland - £371,578.64
- Islington - £364,816.41
- Hackney - £359,975.15
- Northumberland - £344,356.84
- Waltham Forest - £343,459.83
- Oxfordshire - £331,272.92
- Walsall - £309,601.02
- Somerset - £288,318.49
- Wirral - £296,310.10
- Westminster - £290,418.52
- Westmorland and Furness - £301,410.78
- Croydon - £264,529.05
- Windsor and Maidenhead - £222,129.63
- Reading - £218,584.70
- Sutton - £202,475.48
- Gateshead - £179,028.20
A DfE spokesperson said school funding is reaching the “highest level in history” in real terms per pupil by 2024-25.
They added: “We recognise that some schools may still need extra support, which is why we are providing up to £40 million additional funding in 2023-24 for schools in financial difficulty.”
