Schools have a number of requests for chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s Spring Budget after being left “bitterly disappointed” by the Autumn Statement, which offered little for education.
The Department for Education has said education funding will be at its highest ever level in real terms for 2024-25, but many schools have warned they will still face severe financial difficulties.
The chancellor will deliver his Spring Budget on Wednesday 6 March, updating Parliament on the economy and announcing any spending and tax plans. The Budget will focus on the government’s current spending review period, which ends in 2024-25, but shorter-term spending needs can also be addressed.
Mohsen Ojja, CEO of Anthem Schools Trust, said: “As education leaders, we seek assurance in the upcoming Spring Budget that history will not repeat itself, sparing us from the turmoil caused by the DfE’s mistake last autumn.”
Last year the DfE said it would increase school funding through the national funding formula by 2.7 per cent for 2024-25 - but it later revised this figure down to 1.9 per cent after an error was discovered in the processing of pupil numbers. Unions said this revision equated to £370 million less funding.
An increased number of maintained schools and trusts faced in-year deficits for 2022-23, and the Institute of School Business Leadership (ISBL) has warned that many schools currently fear running out of money.
Offsetting cost pressures and teacher pay
Kreston Global’s annual academies benchmarking report found that schools were struggling, in particular, with non-staff costs, such as energy prices.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) previously warned that schools’ costs were increasing at around the same rate as their funding, meaning school budgets were “stagnating” in real terms.
The Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL), in its budget representation, said a pay award for teachers in line with in inflation in 2024 would not be enough to reverse “longstanding pay erosion”, and called for sufficient funding for schools to afford pay awards.
Benedicte Yue, chief financial officer of River Learning Trust, told Tes: “Drawing on reserves is not a sustainable solution. They can only be spent once. Failure to invest will cost more in the long term.”
Minimum per-pupil funding ‘disaster’
For 2023-24, minimum per-pupil funding levels were increased by 0.5 per cent, but ASCL said the funding floor protections introduced in 2020-21 have not been maintained during this spending review period.
Gary Lewis is CEO at the Lighthouse Schools Partnership multi-academy trust, which has 17 of its 30 schools receiving minimum per-pupil funding.
Mr Lewis told Tes that the 0.5 per cent increase had left trusts with schools like his being “forced to cut to the bone”.
“We would like next year’s rise in the minimum per-pupil funding level (MPPFL) to be ahead of the overall settlement, to compensate,” he said.
“Currently minimum funding is only scheduled to rise in line with other funding in 2024-25, but that bakes in this year’s disaster - we need restoration. We cannot face another year like this one.”
The Confederation of School Trusts said that trusts with schools funded through this mechanism are facing “severe financial hardship”. It urged the chancellor to allocate additional funding for trusts struggling as a result of the “very low increase” in MPPFL in its budget submission.
‘Inadequate’ SEND funding
Maintained schools and academies continue to struggle with spiralling demand for special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) support, and the costs involved.
The F40 group of local authorities that have previously attracted the lowest levels of per-pupil funding estimated last year that an additional £4.6 billion a year was needed to meet high-needs demand.
Shan Moylan, chief operations officer at LEO Academy Trust, said the situation has been made worse by “inadequate funding”.
And funding that is allocated to high needs is “disappearing into the black hole of deficit recovery, and not getting to the frontline where it can make a difference and meet need”, ASCL said in its budget submission.
The DfE runs the Safety Vale and Delivering Better Value programmes, allowing local authorities facing large high-needs deficits to offset these in return for signing up to reforms of provision.
Natalie Perera, chief executive of the Education Policy Institute (EPI) think tank, said one of the government’s priorities in the Budget should be underwriting councils’ high-needs overspends and ensuring that allocated funds actually align with the “true costs” of providing support.
Ms Yue added: “We need to reset the system by eradicating historical debt, investing in mainstream schools to support inclusion and accelerating the pace of SEND and alternative-provision reforms.”
Meanwhile, Moira Marder, CEO of the Ted Wragg Trust, said her MAT, which has 16 schools across all phases in the South West, would like to see an increase in funding that would enable it to develop locally tailored solutions for SEND support.
Capital funding and crumbly concrete
The need to repair or replace hundreds of school buildings at risk of collapse due to the presence of reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC) is still yet to be fully resolved.
Unions called at the Autumn Statement for an extra £4.4 billion a year in capital funding, based on an estimate from the Office of Government Property that £7 billion a year was needed to maintain the school estate.
In February the DfE announced its long-term plan for schools affected by RAAC, announcing that 119 of these will be included in the School Rebuilding Programme and almost all of the rest will receive grants to fund RAAC removal.
It has not yet been announced where the grant money will come from.
“The safety of all school and college buildings must be of the highest priority to the government, as it is to the responsible bodies which run and maintain them,” ASCL said.
ASCL has asked for assurance that current capital budgets will not be diverted to cover RAAC costs.
The widening disadvantage gap
Several organisations have been campaigning for the National Tutoring Programme (NTP) funding to be extended beyond this academic year at the budget, to help close the disadvantage-related attainment gap.
Both ASCL and David Clayton, CEO of Endeavour Learning Trust, called on the chancellor to extend the Recovery Premium to help schools continue to tackle the aftermath of the pandemic.
Social mobility charity The Sutton Trust has asked for a focus on tutoring for the most disadvantaged pupils, as well as a rebalancing of the national funding formula to target pupils in deprived areas.
Nick Harrison, CEO of The Sutton Trust, said: “At his party conference last year, the prime minister said education was his main funding priority for every spending review from now on.
“It’s about time we saw policy decisions that start to reflect this in the Budget statement, particularly after the underwhelming Autumn Statement.”
But an announcement of further cash currently looks unlikely, after it was reported in February that the chancellor was not keen on extending funding for the NTP.
Mental health support and funding flexibility
One of the biggest issues that the DfE has been addressing since the pandemic is the increase in pupil absence across the country.
Mr Clayton said the government needs to use the Budget to commit to adequately funding mental health provision to stop poor mental health from exacerbating absence, and to “alleviate the burden on schools”.
Lee Mason-Ellis, CEO of The Pioneer Academy, said MATs were hoping for more flexibility in any funding announced in the Budget, adding that “at the moment there is a lot of red tape”.
