School budgets are tight at the best of times, but the pandemic has resulted in budgets being stretched further than ever, despite government funding schemes
The last 12 months since the pandemic began have been a rollercoaster, to say the least. A whirlwind of policies, instructions and guidance has been thrown at schools from every angle, often leaving school business leaders feeling confused and overwhelmed; this is especially true when it has come to finance and funding.
When the pandemic struck the Department for Education confirmed that state-funded schools would continue to receive their budgets for the coming year, regardless of any periods of closure. However, COVID-19 created many additional costs, including increased premises costs where schools stayed open over holiday periods for vulnerable children and the children of critical workers, with some schools having to provide support for free school meals where costs were not covered by the national voucher scheme, and money spent on making schools COVID-secure including increased cleaning, signage and hygiene provisions.
As well as additional outgoings, income was also lost from places like school-run catering, the inability to hire out premises to outside organisations, and not being able to put on the usual fundraising events.
More money, more problems
To counter-balance these incurred costs the government put in place a process of reimbursements for certain, specific, exceptional costs incurred during the period March to July 2020. The government also recently announced a new, £700m, recovery package, £300m of which had already been announced by the prime minister in January.
The £400m of new money takes the total catch-up fund to £1.7bn. Of this, £200m will be invested in summer schools, which will be targeted initially at 11-year-olds moving up to secondary school next September. A further £18m will be used to support language development in early years settings.
The funding also includes a one-off £302m recovery premium for state primary and secondary schools, building on the pupil premium, to further support pupils who need it most. The average primary school will receive around £6,000 extra funding, and the average secondary school around £22,000.
However, NAHT has released new data that shows that the £6,000 average funding allocated to primary schools through the recovery premium has been entirely wiped out for many schools because of a change in how the government calculates the number of children eligible for pupil premium funding.
Normally schools report the number of pupils they have who are eligible for pupil premium in January but, for the 2020/2021 academic year, the government has changed the date for this census to October. This means that any children who became eligible during the intervening time will not receive any extra funding until next year.
In a survey of NAHT’s school leader members 62% of respondents had five or more pupils who had become eligible for pupil premium between the October and January census. Currently, primary schools receive £1,345 for each child eligible for pupil premium, so the lost funding for five pupils is £6,725 – more than the £6,000 ‘catch-up’ funding allocated to primary schools, on average. This means that almost two thirds of schools surveyed have been left worse off, due to the change, even after the latest education recovery funding is taken into account.
Still not enough
According to calculations by the teachers‘ union NASUWT this year’s school funding would need an injection of at least £2.38bn if COVID-related costs account for as little as five per cent of expenditure; this is in addition to the large-scale investment in child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS) that local authorities and academy trusts say they will need.
Further to this, new analysis by the Department for Education shows average per-pupil funding for five-to-16 year-olds fell by around 0.6 per cent in real terms between 2019-20 and 2020-21 – from £6,320 to £6,280. It was supposed to rise by 4.1 per cent, but this has been revised after the government updated its measure of inflation to take account of ‘atypical’ movement in prices caused by the COVID-19 pandemic; it means per-pupil funding actually fell slightly, in real terms, in the first year of the government’s new three-year funding settlement.
In addition, findings from an National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) survey which looked at the impact of the pandemic on the funding landscape in mainstream primary and secondary schools in England found that the majority of schools had suffered financially as a result of the pandemic. They found that:
Schools have lost a significant amount of income, and incurred substantial additional expenditures, during the 2020/21 academic year.
The government’s ‘levelling-up’ agenda has resulted in deprived schools – those in the quartile with the highest proportions of disadvantaged pupils on roll – receiving the smallest average increases in funding.
Around 1,500 schools are at particular risk of great financial hardship due to COVID-19. These schools are disproportionately likely to be deprived.
Payments for the ‘exceptional costs’ associated with coronavirus scheme covered only some of the additional costs which schools incurred during the 2019/20 academic year.
Schools in London and urban areas were more likely to apply for the exceptional costs scheme.
The new COVID workforce fund is unlikely to ease pressures on school finances.
Current catch-up support is unlikely to reach all the pupils who need it.
Pupils in the most deprived schools, who are in the greatest need of catch-up support, are at the greatest risk of losing out.
Existing and additional funding will be insufficient to cover the additional costs of COVID-19, at least for a number of at-risk schools.
It is likely that schools will continue to feel the impact of COVID on their budgets for many years to come. It is hoped that additional funding from the government will also continue to help ease the difficulties schools will face as there is a push for pupils to ‘catch-up’. Schools have proven their resilience and determination this year more than ever but, without additional money, they can go only do so much whilst they navigate the path to recovery.
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