The Department for Education is actively considering reforming special school funding amid questions about why it has remained at £10,000 per commissioned pupil place for more than 10 years, a senior official has revealed.
A DfE director said that the government could take the “radical step” of replacing the system of place funding for special schools and admitted that it was “odd” for the £10K rate to have remained the same for more than a decade.
Special-school leaders asked department officials, at a conference today, if there was any plan to move away from a system of place-based funding as the £10,000 figure used was now “woefully” short of what is needed.
In response, Tom Goldman, deputy director of the DfE’s Funding Policy Unit, revealed that the government was actively looking at changing the way special schools are funded.
‘Payment should probably change over time’
Speaking at the National Network of Special Schools (NNoSS) for Business Professionals annual conference in Manchester this afternoon, Mr Goldman said: “Should the £10,000 change over time? Yes, probably.”
He said the situation was complicated as increasing the place funding would mean that the amount of top-up funding special schools received beyond the £10,000 would need to come down.
He added: “It does create the very odd situation of £10,000 having been chosen back in 2013 and not changing, so that is something we are actively looking at at the moment.
“The question there is do we move away from place funding? We could do that; that would be a much more radical step.”
Mr Goldman said the logic of providing a set amount of funding for each place had been designed to give “certainty to special schools” in a “quite variable and volatile” funding system “very much centred around individual children”.
But he added: “Obviously, that failure to increase the £10,000 has shifted the balance away from the certainty over time.”
And he said there have been propositions put to the DfE to move away from place funding for special schools and instead fund them through the National Funding Formula as a base, and then build up the amounts they received.
Funding system must fit reforms
He told the conference that this is something the DfE will consider alongside wider special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) policy reforms.
“I don’t want to design a funding system that might be a better fit for today and introduce it at a time when it’s not a better fit for the system that is actually coming into place.”
Last year, the DfE published a SEND and alternative provision improvement plan, which proposed creating new national standards and a system of bands and tariffs, setting out what should be provided and how much it should cost. These have yet to get under way.
In a report published last week, the Confederation of School Trusts warned that a funding model for special schools, based on £10,000 per commissioned place, “is no longer appropriate” and was based on costings carried out in 2009.
It called for the core funding of special schools and alternative provision settings to be included in the main National Funding Formula.
Pauline Aitchison, who leads the NNoSS network, said: “We appreciate Tom Goldman and David Withey, the CEO of the Education and Skills Funding Agency, coming to listen to our members’ concerns today and we look forward to continuing this dialogue with them.”
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