School Funding: What Will You Get?

The new National Funding Formula was announced today by the Secretary of State for Education, Justine Greening MP.  Many school leaders and teachers will be interested in how their school’s funding will change.  Times are hard and getting harder.

The headlines are:

• A minimum per-pupil funding level for secondary schools of £4,600 in 2018/19 and £4,800 in 2019/20 and for primary schools of £3,300 in 2018/19 and £3,500 in 2019/20
• Pupil led funding will increase by a minimum of 0.5% per pupil and a maximum of 3% per pupil in each of the two years
• The lump sum per school will be set at £110,000 in the national formula
• There is a sparsity/rural schools will gain on average 3.9%
• Local authorities will get schools’ funding in a lump sum so will still be able to change the indicative amounts determined by the National Funding Formula up to 2020.

If you want to know your own school’s indicative funding (or the school down the road) there is an excel spreadsheet available for download here.

It’s the one labelled “Impact of the Schools NFF”

Once the file has downloaded you want to click on the second tab – first drop down box allows you to click on the LA the school is in.  The drop down box allows you to select a school.  Be warned you need pretty good eyesight as the names of the LA and schools is rather small.  Here’s St. Mary’s as an example.

St. Mary’s Catholic Academy, Blackpool

The table will give you the school’s 2017/18 funding which is used as the baseline.  Then the indicative or notional funding for 2018/19 and 2019/20 with percentage increases; remember the local authority’s School Forum still has the discretion to alter these amounts.

Every school should get at least a 0.5% increase in 2018/19 and a 1% increase in 2019/20.  However neither of the minimum guaranteed increases is likely to cover the increase in salary costs, even more so if the salary cap is removed, and other increases will further increase the budgetary pressures on these schools.  As with all fairer funding changes; it depends whether you are a winner or a loser on how fair you feel the changes are.