One of the country’s biggest multi-academy trusts has announced plans to centralise the funding and reserves of its 60 schools.
REAch2 Academy Trust has announced today that it is starting a consultation on moving to a model known as GAG pooling, whereby schools’ grant funding is ‘pooled’ together at trust level and then redistributed back to schools.
Instead of a funding formula being attached to every child, the consultation proposes that the trust moves to a model in which funding is allocated on the basis of what each school needs to deliver education.
The trust said that pooling reserves would allow it to carry out more strategic planning, accelerate spending on buildings and “invest in priority areas such as digital transformation, enrichment activities and supporting children with SEND”.
Academy trust funding: the attraction of GAG pooling
Definite plans will be agreed with school leaders, but the MAT said the model could enable the introduction of trust-wide educational psychologists, speech and language therapists and school counsellors.
Cathie Paine, chief executive of REAch2, said: “Our fundamental aim is to achieve equity for every single child in our trust. And while we are incredibly proud of the work that our schools do, the reality is that the current model has a number of inequities. We believe this package of proposals will put us in the strongest position to be able to deliver on our goal of equity for over 19,000 children across our 60 wonderful schools.”
Earlier this year the latest Kreston Global Academies Benchmark Report said that the proportion of MATs carrying out “GAG pooling” had increased massively compared with its previous report for 2020-21.
The report said that 23 per cent of MATs were GAG pooling in 2021-22 compared with just 14 per cent the previous year.
Some large trusts have opted against GAG pooling, arguing that an alternative model - known as top-slicing - can be more “ethical”.
As an example, speaking to Tes earlier this year, Wayne Norrie, CEO of Greenwood Academies Trust (GAT), which is formed of 39 schools across seven local authorities, said that schools in his trust often get different levels of funding because they are in different local authorities, with schools in Nottingham getting £1,000 more per pupil now than children in Northamptonshire.
“Now I could say all my children across the trust should have the same funding. But if you’re a child in Nottingham, who goes to a GAT academy in Nottingham, why should you have less money spent on you than all the other children in Nottingham that don’t go to a GAT academy?” he explained.
And last week, Jon Andrews, head of analysis at the Education Policy Institute think tank, said that school trusts shifting cash “highlights the tension that exists between the growth of academy trusts and the transparency in school funding that the national funding formula was supposed to provide”.
Tes recently held a roundtable event to debate the GAG pooling and top-slicing models of school funding used by MATs. You can watch a recording of the discussion here.
