A senior government official has admitted that some multi-academy trusts’ budget forecasts “weren’t worth the paper” they were written on last year because an announcement on teacher pay came after MATs had submitted them.
The chief executive of the Education and Skills Funding Agency, David Withey, said it wanted to avoid a repeat of this to ensure that schools could plan with certainty for 2023-24.
He was speaking as the Department for Education faced repeated calls to publish its decision on teacher pay in the light of the School Teachers’ Review Body’s (STRB) pay recommendations for the next academic year.
There have been leaked reports that the STRB is proposing a 6.5 per cent pay rise for teachers, and both education unions and the Labour Party have urged ministers to publish the independent panel’s recommendations and the government’s response to them.
At the School Resource Management Summit held by the department today, a panel of senior civil servants was asked by its chair, Steve Taylor, the chief executive of the Cabot Learning Federation, when a decision on pay was going to be made for next year, and if there would be a resulting change in funding.
Teacher pay and academy trust budgets
In response, Mr Withey said that the ESFA wanted to be able to give trusts certainty this year to help their planning.
“I started in this role in August last year. I think two or three weeks after last year’s pay award came out, which was, in turn, a couple of days after you had submitted your budget forecast returns to us,” he said.
“So when I sit here and talk about certainty, in my first period in the role, there was quite a lot of eye rolling [about giving certainty]. One of the things we want to make sure we do is working towards a time frame that enables you to plan with certainty.
“Planning with certainty helps you deliver better outcomes for schools and it helps me as well because quite a lot of our budget forecast return data from last year wasn’t really worth the paper it was written on because of the changes that came later - and that doesn’t help us to fulfil our role either.
“We are keen to try to make sure we are pushing that conversation along as quickly as possible. We have extended the budget forecast deadline this year by a month to buy us a little bit more time to make sure that happens.”
Academy trusts normally have to submit their budget forecasts to the ESFA by the end of next month (July) but the deadline has been extended by a month until the end of August this year.
The ESFA is an executive government agency, sponsored by the DfE, responsible for allocating funding to academy trusts.
In July last year it was announced that experienced teachers would get a 5 per cent pay rise from September 2022, which was higher than the 3 per cent figure the department had originally proposed in its evidence to the STRB in March.
At the time headteachers warned that the announcement would push them into deficit because it came after academy trust leaders had already set their budgets for the next year - and there was no additional funding attached to meet the extra costs involved.
In his Autumn Statement in September chancellor Jeremy Hunt then announced the government would spend an extra £2.3 billion per year in schools over the following two years.
