The publication of initial pupil premium allocations for next year has been delayed because of a problem identifying pupils who qualify, the Department for Education has said today.
The DfE said it had to delay publication of the allocations for two months after it had been “made aware of a problem with its identification of Reception-aged pupils who qualify for pupil premium”.
This means officials “need more time to ensure that the 2024 to 2025 pupil premium allocations are accurate,” according to a note added today to pupil premium guidance.
The initial allocations will now be published in the week starting 6 May. Tes understands that they were supposed to be published this month, which means they would have had to be published by the end of tomorrow as the last working day in March.
Local authorities will still receive payments in June and academies in July as scheduled, the DfE said.
Pupil premium problem
Pupil premium is a funding pot for state schools that allocates extra cash per eligible pupil aimed at increasing the attainment of disadvantaged children.
Schools and local authorities receive per-pupil allocations for those eligible for free school meals (or who have been in the past six years) and looked after or previously looked after pupils.
The delay comes after DfE permanent secretary Susan Acland-Hood had to apologise last October following a department announcement that it had made an error in calculating schools’ National Funding Formula (NFF) allocations for 2024-25.
The education secretary, Gillian Keegan, ordered a review into the error, which the DfE said at the time was due to “incorrect processing of pupil numbers”.
New calculations were issued with lower per-pupil funding increases, which unions said amounted to a £370 million shortfall on the originally announced allocations.
Accountant Peter Wyman, who led the review into the mistake, said that it happened because officials did not include some pupils in two new local authority areas in national calculations.
His review found that “checks should have been in place [that] would have detected the error. Checks later in the process, including tests like double running the calculation, assumed these inputs were correct”.
Mr Wyman was positive about the DfE’s willingness to learn from the error.
Regarding the publication of pupil premium allocations, Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said a delay was preferable to an error, though “any delay to allocations around funding is frustrating because it makes it even more difficult for schools to be able to plan their budgets”.
“We would imagine that the Department for Education is particularly conscious of the danger of a mistake following the error last autumn,” he added. “That sort of mistake simply cannot be allowed to happen again.”
Paul Whiteman, general secretary of the NAHT school leaders’ union, said: “It is difficult to understand how this problem has only just emerged when the data used is from October’s school census.”
He said schools should be able to tell from their own census returns what their allocations should be.
“But this does represent the continuation of a concerning trend of delays when it comes to the Department for Education announcing funding allocations, and this seems to be getting worse every year,” Mr Whiteman added.
Allocations have also not yet been published for 2024-25 for the teachers’ pay additional grant, teachers’ pension grant, universal infant free school meals funding - or even a per-pupil amount for this - or the PE and sport premium grant, he added.
The DfE has been contacted for comment.
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