Plans to remove a £50 million school improvement fund for councils will be seen as a “thinly veiled attempt to turn up the heat” on maintained schools to convert to academy status, a headteachers’ union has said this afternoon.

The Department for Education has launched a consultation today on removing the local authority School Improvement Monitoring and Brokering Grant.

Instead, the plan would be for councils to fund all of their school improvement activity by taking a slice of funding directly from school budgets.

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The consultation documents say the funding changes would allow councils to adjust to the government’s long-term ambition for all primary schools to become academies and bring maintained schools in line with how improvement in multi-academy trusts is funded - where cash is top-sliced by the trust.

The plan is to cut the grant by 50 per cent next year and scrap the grant by April 2023.

Nick Brook, deputy general secretary of school leaders’ union NAHT, said: “In the week when local authorities found little to celebrate from the spending review, today’s announcement that DfE plans to remove the £50 million local authority school improvement grant will be greeted with disbelief by many.

“Never has the phrase ‘give with one hand, but take with the other’ rung truer. This will be seen by some as a thinly veiled attempt to turn up the heat on LA-you maintained schools, to encourage more to leave LA control and join academy trusts.

“In pursuing their academisation policy, it is imperative that the government remains even-handed.

“Around 4 million children are still taught in LA schools, and the government has a responsibility to ensure that all schools are supported to be as good as they can be, irrespective of governance arrangements.”

The consultation document says that the changes would bring funding arrangements for councils’ improvement activity closer into line with the relationship between individual academies and their MATs, which normally top-slice funding to secure improvement support.

The DfE document also says it will enable councils to adjust over time to the government’s longer-term ambition for all schools to become academies within a strong MAT.

It adds that this is “an endpoint that a number of councils are already closing in on, where councils would no longer maintain schools.”

The consultation says: “We believe that moving at this time to funding these responsibilities via de-delegation, in the same way that councils fund additional improvement services they provide to maintained schools, will provide a smoother transition for councils in this position.”

The consultation document says that the current funding arrangements for council school improvement activity “presume that there is a clear distinction between core improvement activities, for which the grant is provided, and additional activity, which councils fund “through de-delegation or as a traded service”.

However, the DfE says it believes this distinction no longer exists.

It adds: “Rather, we believe that, in practice, activity connected to their core improvement activities forms part of a continuum of wider improvement activity that councils may choose to undertake.

“This is understandable: councils will want to act before performance deteriorates significantly and formal intervention becomes an inevitability, for example, by putting in place arrangements to spot signs of potential underperformance early and challenge it; and only moving on to formal intervention through warning notices and further intervention powers where this hasn’t worked and performance has deteriorated.”

The document says that as fewer than one in five councils have issued warning notices to schools in each of the last three years, this implies that the School Improvement Monitoring and Brokering Grant is being used predominantly on early challenges rather than the use of formal intervention powers.