School census data – how can this be used in strategic planning

Andrew Blench, school business management consultant and coach, gives his advice for how census data can be used in planning

All state-maintained schools are required to submit four sets of census data per year to the DfE. These are as follows:

• Autumn census – census day is 6^th October 2022 and the deadline for submission of your census return is 2^nd November 2022.
• Spring Census – census day is 19^th January 2023 and the deadline for submission of your census return is 15th February 2023.
• Summer census – census day is 18^th May 2023 and the deadline for submission of your census return is 14th June 2023.

For schools who submit their census data via their local authority your submission date may be earlier than the dates above. These are for schools who upload their own census data direct.

When I started my career as a school business manager, I was aware of the census returns, but didn’t have direct responsibility for their collation and submission. To be honest it all seemed like a bit of a dark art and something to be left for the data geeks to sort out. It was only after having been in the role for a couple of years that I realised the significance of the returns and why I needed to take a greater interest and involvement in their production and submission.

I discovered that there are two broad reasons why I needed to be care more about what appeared to be a very dry subject. Firstly, the data within the returns directly affected the funding that my school would receive from the LA/central government. Secondly this data would be used by the LA, central government departments to assess and judge the performance of my school.

Funding

If I were to give any new SBM a tip it would be to not take for granted that the data, your school MIS system drops into the census is correct. Where the data is wrong or incomplete this can be an expensive mistake, as it can result in school getting less funding than it should and can also take a long time to correct. 

My first school was a secondary school with its own sixth form. Early on in my time there I checked the post 16 funding allocation for the school and discovered that we had a few students who were being funded as part time students. They were not attending part time. To attract the full level of funding the students needed to be enrolled on a programme of study with planned hours of at least 485. 

When I looked back at the relevant census it was clear that the students’ hours had been entered incorrectly into the school MIS system, which resulted in a loss of income. We are able to submit a business case to the ESFA to recover some of the funding. We also put in place a more robust process of data collection and sense checking between the data analyses and the sixth form administrator to make sure this wouldn’t happen again.

There are lots of data sets which go into each census, and each can be used for slightly different purposes and it’s in the interest of SBMs to make sure this is right.

For example, the spring census will ask for the number of pupils entitled to free school meals and also the numbers of pupils taking a meal on census day (19^th January 2023). This data is then used to inform levels of Universal Infant School Meal funding by the ESFA/Las. For this reason, many primary schools run incentives to encourage parents to book their child in for a meal on census day.

Making sure that free school meal entitlement (current and historic) is entered correctly in your MIS system and carried through into your census return is a priority. Does your MIS have start and end dates for FSM entitlement? For any child who was applied for and was granted FSM at any point in the last six years school could attract £1385 (Primary) or £985 (secondary) for pupil in pupil premium funding. Some MIS systems have a tick box which needs to be checked in order to count a pupil as being pupil premium. It’s well worth doing a data trawl to make sure all are captured. Don’t forget that Looked After Children attract a pupil premium allocation of £2,410 and children of serving (or retired) service people attract a premium of £320. 

Do you have the correct postcodes for your children entered in your school MIS system? An element of the National Funding Formula uses post codes to determine the amount of deprivation funding your school or trust will receive. Every address in England sits within a geographical zone which is allocated a deprivation index. These are called IDACI – Income Deprivation Affecting Children Index. 

So, collecting and updating your families’ addresses is not just about making sure that communications work smoothly between home and school, but also affects funding.

These are just a few tips on how the data links through to future funding levels for your school or trust. You can access more detail by using the links above to the census guides.

Making judgements and decisions

Your data submitted in census returns also filters through to other government departments and online data portals. Your institution level data, pupil numbers, attendance, gender, ethnicity, exclusions, exam results are used for various purposes. Ofsted, ESFA and Regional Directors Office all take a risks-based approach to intervention in or inspection of an educational setting. 

The financial benchmarking data for your school or trust is informed by the data in school census and workforce census. See Benchmark your school’s financial data – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk) you will recognise there data which you have submitted in workforce census returns. 

Looking at census returns over a period of time also gives the SBM an idea of the direction of travel in the demographic of the school population. How are overall student numbers working? Going down/up/stable. What about the proportion of SEN/EHCP or EAL pupils? All of these have implications for funding but also resource allocations.

I think you will see that we can’t afford to be disinterested in the story which the census return tells us. I think that this saying is usually attributed to Churchill – ‘there are lies, damned lies and then statistics’. I trust that your census doesn’t fall into any of these categories.