Multi-academy trusts that run both primary and secondary schools are increasingly being forced to divert funds towards younger pupils to prevent falling standards or closures in the face of funding pressures and declining rolls, leaders have told Tes.
And leaders of MATs - which have the freedom to distribute money between their schools as they choose, with some limits - expect the trend to become even more pronounced in the coming years as the decrease in pupil numbers accelerates.
Basic per-pupil funding rates are higher at secondary than at primary level, with every primary school receiving at least £4,405 per pupil, and every secondary school at least £5,715 in 2023-24.
Falling birth rates mean there are projected to be half a million fewer pupils in English state nurseries and primaries in 2028, compared with 2022, reducing the funds available to primaries in the future.
Trust leaders also warn that overheads like energy costs are difficult to cut in line with predicted funding reductions.
They say that some primary schools would be at risk of closure without shifting pooled funds towards them.
Some leaders warn this raises questions over the viability of standalone primaries that lack financial support from larger trusts.
While some education policy experts see the flexibility of MATs to shift money between different schools and phases as a strength, they also highlight the “tension” it reveals between the growth of academy trusts and the “transparency” in school funding that the National Funding Formula was intended to provide.
Academy trusts redistributing funding to primary schools
Several leaders of cross-phase trusts told Tes that they redistribute funds towards their primary schools, and expect this to increase in the near future.
Sir Daniel Moynihan, chief executive of the Harris Federation, which runs 52 primary and secondary schools in London and Essex, told Tes that a declining pupil population meant the trust was having to “think hard” about how to maintain standards.
“As a group of 52 schools, we use shared contracts and services wherever this makes sense, generating annual savings of around £5 million to £6 million,” he said.
“The saving is ploughed back into our classrooms, but is increasingly being used to subsidise our primaries and maintain the quality our children deserve and need.”
Similarly, Dan Morrow, chief executive of Dartmoor Multi Academy Trust, which runs three secondaries, 14 primaries and one all-through school, said the trust already “effectively” adjusted the per-pupil funding in favour of primary pupils “to iron out inequalities in overall allocations”, and that this would “absolutely be a greater trend” in coming years.
He said that without this approach “there would be closures for sure”, adding: “I think it presents huge challenges to primary-only trusts, opportunities for cross-phase and an effective shielding for secondary-only trusts.”
Some trust leaders explained how they supported their primaries in other ways, even when not directly shifting cash towards them.
Rob McDonough, chief executive of East Midlands Education Trust, which runs 22 schools - 12 of which are primary - said two of the trust’s primaries were seeing falling rolls and, as a result, reduced income.
“If a school is in a declining revenue deficit situation - even though they may have some reserves to support themselves in the short term - we will support the school with a recovery plan over three years to help them become more viable in the long term,” he said.
For example, the trust has helped schools to develop and invest in sports facilities, which they can let out to generate income.
He added: “If the schools were standalone academies, they might not get this kind of support. They may run into a cash flow problem and might struggle to pay salaries. The Education and Skills Funding Agency would, most likely, intervene and direct them into a trust.”
Small primaries a ‘net drain’ on trusts
Rachael Warwick, CEO of Ridgeway Education Trust - which runs two secondaries and one primary in Oxfordshire - shared Mr Morrow’s concern about standalone primary schools that “won’t have the resilience of a trust to support them through tough financial times”.
“Whilst many primary schools don’t tend to be warm to the idea of MATs, I think they have more to gain and less to lose than secondaries, on the whole,” she said.
And Hugh Greenway, CEO of the Elliot Foundation, a primary-only trust with 32 academies, said that the average primary school - a one-form entry school slightly below its PAN [Published Admission Number] - was now a “net drain” on any trust it joined.
He said challenges with primary funding had been “percolating for some time” and that the “looming issue of falling rolls merely compounds the problem”.
And he added that his trust would generally only take on primaries with more than 300 pupils, and could not afford to take on more one-form entry schools unless they federated to another school.
Pointing to the current mixture of local authority-run and trust-run schools, he said: “We are paying the price of chaotic fragmentation. We’ve gone from 152 or so local authorities that were big enough to absorb the slings and arrows of things like this happening and to redistribute money accordingly.
“Now, most LAs are on the verge of bankruptcy and very few trusts are large enough to mitigate. We are, in a sense, part way across the stream in terms of moving from LAs to MATs but with neither the will nor the energy to complete the crossing or turn back.”
While some education leaders want trusts to consolidate and become bigger so they have flexibility to redistribute funding, Mr Greenway suggested this would not work without additional funding being made available to primaries.
“You don’t save struggling swimmers by tying them together or by throwing them millstones. Ideally, you give them life jackets or teach them to swim,” he said.
Sector leaders and experts have highlighted some possible solutions that policymakers could examine in order to tackle the situation.
Jon Andrews, head of analysis at the Education Policy Institute think tank, said the Department for Education could give greater weight to primary-aged pupils in the basic per-pupil funding, or increase the lump sum allocated to all schools.
But he added: “As ever, given a finite pot of money, there are trade-offs, and such changes would result in lower funding in secondary schools than some might have been expecting.”
‘Tension’ over school funding
He said that, while the flexibility that allowed trusts to give greater weight to primaries than suggested by the National Funding Formula (NFF) was one of the “strengths of the trust system”, it also “highlights the tension that exists between the growth of academy trusts and the transparency in school funding that the NFF was supposed to provide”.
The NFF was partially introduced in 2018-19, in an attempt to iron out inconsistencies in school funding across the country. A consultation last year said a full “direct” formula could be expected by 2027.
The DfE has previously said that the new formula will be more “transparent” by setting clear criteria for how schools are funded, such as the proportion of their pupils who are from disadvantaged backgrounds.
But once a MAT receives the money allocated to each school, it has some freedom to move it between schools in its chain, potentially overruling the formula.
Peter Cansell, information officer at the National Association of Primary Education, said he was glad that some MATs were recognising the disparity in funding between primary and secondary schools, “unlike the DfE”.
He said the principle on which the NFF was based did “not recognise that early years and primary education are the foundations without which secondary education flounders”.
Steve Rollett, deputy chief executive at the Confederation of School Trusts, said that one of the “strengths “of a school trusts was “the ability to share expertise and resources across multiple schools”.
“This can particularly help primary schools that tend to be smaller. This isn’t about setting schools against each other - our common goal is to help all pupils do their best. Trusts are best placed to make decisions over how to allocate funding in order to ensure all children can thrive,” he said.
He added that the bottom line was that “all schools need to receive adequate funding from government”.
A DfE spokesperson said: “Schools across the country continue to have high standards of financial management and governance, with the latest published data showing that 97.3 percent of academy trusts have balanced accounts.
“Pooling enables trusts the freedom to distribute general annual grant across their academies based on individual need. It promotes self-sufficiency on the part of the trust if one of their academies requires additional resources and support.
“The greater freedom and flexibility that academy trusts enjoy enables the strongest leaders to take responsibility for supporting more schools, developing great teachers and allowing schools to focus on what really matters - the highest quality teaching of a broad and ambitious curriculum.”
