Funding Early Years should be easier than this

The last meeting of the Kingston Schools Forum deliberated at length on the funding of Early Years, that is settings (nurseries to you and me) for pre-school children. The Government, quite rightly in my opinion, wants to increase the provision in this sector and to achieve most of this expansion through the Private, Voluntary and Independent (PVI) providers.

Local Authorities need to introduce a funding formula for all Early Years providers, i.e. those maintained by the Local Authority itself and those maintained by the PVI sector, to ensure that funding is fair and is also sufficient for the increased entitlement children have to nursery education.

The problem is that a simple and reasonable aim has been turned by Kingston Council into a complex formula that takes 7 pages to explain and requires a further 6 pages of examples to tr and bring some clarity to proceedings.

Because the formula is too complex (as it is with the main formula for funding mainstream schools) nobody really understands it and even fewer understand the implications of it so we run the risk that it will not work and this does not become apparent until it is too late to fix.

Schools' funding

We have just entered a three year cycle of schools' funding in which only minor changes can be made to the formula used to allocate funding which should mean that the Kingston Schools Forum (KSF) has little to do. Sadly this is not the case.

Having just spent a year doing a detailed review of funding deprivation (children from deprived families do less well at school) we are now looking at this topic again just because one school that lost out from the changes has complained to the Local Authority.

The new review will take a few months but I have nailed my colours to the mast and fired this opening salvo.

I would appreciation a discussion at some point as to how this issue has arisen. Most years in the budget consultation schools ask for some elements of the formula to be reconsidered but I do not recall the Local Authority ever responding to a school's concerns in this way before. To be specific, similar requests by The Mount have been ignored. I would like to understand how the Local Authority reached it's decision this time as it would appear that it is behaving inconsistently and, therefore, unfairly.

I also have grave concerns about the issues we are being asked to consider in this line of enquiry. The statement is made that there is an increasing gap in the funding between schools and it is implied from this that this is a bad thing. But the gap in need between schools is far far wider than the gap in funding so a rational analysis is likely to conclude that the funding gap should be increased further.

I still fail to see why the Local Authority continues to use funding per pupil as a measure when the main costs are not incurred on a per pupil basis. These figures are also distorted by statement funding which is particularly an issue with special needs settings. And if we are to have a sensible look as schools' funding we need to consider all the income a school gets, including that from parents.

The comment about lowering standards, while welcome, completely misses several points. Every funding decision that we make that diverts money from one set of schools to another could have an impact on standards to say that this recent change could is meaningless. Secondly, despite the efforts of some of us, it has proved impossible within this authority to link funding and standards in a single debate. And thirdly, we already know that the current funding formula has an impact on standards as those schools with the most deprivation are also those with the lowest standards.

I am not sure that asking schools about their budget pressures will provide any objective information and I would question the purpose of this.

I am more than happy to continue the review of primary funding and in order to do so I suggest that the information we need about each school is funding, needs and standards.

Matthew

More on schools' funding

I thought that the big debates on schools' funding had gone as we have just entered a three-year funding cycle where the only changes that we can make are those that we have already said we will make, but I was wrong.

The latest meeting of Kingston Schools' Forum was asked by Kingston Council to establish a working party to look at issues raised by some schools following this year's settlement. In the Primary Sector, some schools have queried the variation in funding received by schools when measured on a per pupil basis.

On first sight you can see why this question has been asked as some schools do receive significantly more funding per pupil than others but the funding is calculated from a not very difficult formula that everybody was consulted on and which was approved with no serious dissent - not even from me! So the funding is right if you look at the details but can seem wrong if you take a simplistic overview.

I suggested that the purpose of the working party should be to explain to the schools why the funding is right (i.e. to explain [yet again] how the formula works) rather than to review a formula that we have just spent a year of detailed work on.

I'm not sure that this distinction was understood so I gave myself the opportunity of making sure that the message was not lost on the working party by volunteering to be on it.

I resent that it is necessary to spend so much time fighting for fair funding but the alternative is not to fight and to let the string schools take the money from the weaker schools that need it more.

A very small step forward for deprived children in Kingston

The working party of the Kingston Schools Forums that I have been on for about a year has finished it's work and our proposals will be going out to schools for consultation soon. The result of our deliberations will see a small shift of funding away from the majority of schools towards the handful that have relatively high levels of deprivation, as measured by the eligibility of pupils for Free School Meals (FSM). I have problems with both the amount of funding being redistributed (you can only give to some schools by taking from others) and the approach taken by Kingston Council to funding deprivation.

Schools that have high levels of deprivation need funding to cover four main areas of cost:

1. Addressing social problems within the families, such as attending meetings with Social Care and the Police. This can be almost a full time role for a senior member of staff.
2. Addressing learning difficulties arising directly from deprivation, typically speech and language skills. Usually this means employing additional staff so teach small groups of children.
3. Making up for things missing from home life, such as having books around and visiting places of interest. Basically this means schools paying for things that parents of wealthier parents normally pay for.
4. Making up for the reduced donations from parents. Some schools get tens of thousands of pounds from their parents whereas others get almost nothing.

The proposals in Kingston go nowhere near addressing these costs. The most that any school will gain is under £100k but the costs are easily twice that.

Kingston Council recognises two types of need at pupil level, deprivation and Special Education Needs (SEN). The funding for SEN is needs based and each SEN child gets an amount of funding based on their assessed need. However, deprivation funding is quite different being based on a pot of money which is allocated between the children eligible for FSM. If deprivation goes up, each deprived child gets less.

Because of the reasons given above I am very unhappy at the way that Kingston is planning to fund deprivation and the battle will continue in future years, it has only been ten years so far!

Sadly, in one way this is actually a relatively positive outcome. A very small step in the right direction contrasts with all the steps taken in the wrong direction in previous years. So the situation overall is bad but it is slightly better than it was.

Kingston Schools Forum (May 2007)

I spent rather longer than I expected at a meeting of the Kingston Schools Forum last night where we had a long debate on our response to the DfES consultation on school, early years and 14-16 funding for the years 2008-11. we discussed about 25 of the 38 questions before we ran out of time, but by then we were mired in some of the more detailed technical aspects.

I spoke rather more than I had expected to and found other committee members agreeing with me far more that I am used to! I hope that the greater understanding of the subject by my colleagues is in some part due to my contributions to the funding debate over the years, otherwise there is little point me being on committee like this.

My overall perception is that having painted itself into a corner on schools' funding a couple of years back (when some schools lost heavily under the revised funding scheme for which Local Authorities and the Government blamed each other) the Government is now trying to loosen some of the strings to allow more of the extra money that has undoubtedly gone into education to go to the places where it will do most good.

Funding for deprivation was again a large part of the discussion and the main problem is that we are being asked to identify the factors that should direct funding without first defining what precisely we mean by deprivation. In particular it is unclear if low-level Special Educational Needs should be included.

An issue with deprivation funding are that the main indicator used for this is entitlement to Free School Meals (FSM) but that only has two values (yes/no) whereas, clearly, deprivation is a wide range. Another factor is that the cost of meeting deprivation is exponential, 2+2=5.

We do seem to be making some progress on this issue and the next step is a workshop with Heads on 12 June.

Fighting for fair funding for schools

One of the education committees that I am on is looking at the funding of deprivation in schools in Kingston upon Thames, an issue I have been very interested in for several years because I have been convinced that our most needy children are not getting the funding that they deserve. Now I have proof.

This chart shows (blue line) the relative deprivation on our schools based on the eligibility of pupils for Free School Meals (FSM) and (purple line) the funding they get to meet that need. In both cases the graphs are scaled so that the most needy is school is 100%.

What this shows very clearly is that almost every school gets proportionally more funding for deprivation than the most needy school. Only one school is funded below the line of actual need (they get 65% of what they should) but most are significantly above, typically getting four times more funding than need. One school gets nine times.

The graph is simple but I never underestimate people's inability to understand simple arguments when they don't like the result so I will believe in fair funding when we finally get it. The government, via the DfES, is starting to kick councils like Kingston upon Thames for not funding deprivation properly, and is currently consulting on the subject, so there is some home that even this backwater may be spurred into action one day. Our children need this to happen.

Funding deprivation in schools

The funding of schools is a subject very dear to my heart and is probably the main reason that I have remained a school governor for the last thirteen years. For most of that time I have been fighting the local council for fairer funding for our school which is losing out because it serves an area of relative poverty in an otherwise well-off area and the needs of the school, or rather of its children, are not well understood. Luckily the government now recognises that schools like ours are losing out and is forcing all councils to look at how they fund deprivation in school. The council has established a working party to consider the problem and obviously I volunteered to be on it.

I won't go into the details of schools' funding here as it is a complex issue that is not properly understood by many of the people directly involved in it  but I will give a flavour of the issue by summarizing some of the findings from a recent government study on the issue.

The existing regulatory framework places only a very modest requirement on local authorities to distribute funding to schools on the basis of deprivation. The emphasis that local authorities place on deprivation in their funding formulae varies greatly.

There is a wide degree of variation between local authorities’ strategies for assessing and funding the costs of deprivation, and there has often been no systematic approach to reviewing need.

Local authorities and Schools Forums sometimes have little understanding of the national system of deprivation funding, and of the intended purpose of this funding at a local level. This leads to significant variation in funding levels between schools with similar proportions of pupils eligible for free school meals.

It is clear that additional expenditure has a positive, if relatively modest, impact on attainment. This impact is greatest when expenditure is targeted on the most deprived schools, and towards pupils who are eligible for free school meals.

Overall, local authorities’ decisions on the balance of funding between schools are not leading to deprivation funding being accurately or consistently targeted towards schools in deprived areas.