Responding to the latest autumn budget announcement , Jon Andrews, Head of Analysis and Director for School System and Performance at the Education Policy Institute said :
“The government’s first budget represented a key opportunity to set out how it would address the challenges in the early years and education sectors. Given the spending constraints imposed by government and competing priorities, the limited offering is not unexpected, but there are systemic issues that the government still needs to address.
The announcement of a further £2.3 billion for the schools budget represents a real terms increase of 1.8 per cent and of this £1 billion of this has been earmarked for the high needs budget. The government is right to prioritise funding for special educational needs, but £1 billion represents a quarter of the deficits that the National Audit Office estimates that local authorities have accumulated. Given the perilous state of local authority budgets, clarity on how that funding will be allocated or what it is intended for is now urgently required. If the situation for local authorities has not been fundamentally changed, then we still risk services for our most vulnerable being cut.
As well as additional funding, the system also needs to be reformed to ensure that the allocated funds are aligned with the true costs of providing support to all children who require it, so that unavoidable overspends do not reoccur in the future.
The budget allocates an additional £300m to 16-19 education which has seen greater cuts than earlier phases, and where spend is low against international standards, though we do not yet know how this will be allocated. We have previously called for funding to be better targeted towards disadvantaged students through a new ‘student premium’, similar to the pupil premium in schools. We estimate that this alone would cost £340 million a year.
The sector will have more than one eye on other announcements in the budget that could have significant implications. Increases in employer national insurance contributions including lowering the threshold at which employers will pay, creates a significant cost pressure for all parts of the system and will eat up much of any new funding. In addition, the rise in the national living wage will have a particular impact on an already stretched early years sector.
In spring, we will see the results of the government’s spending review which will set budgets for at least three years. Over the course of the spending review period, falling pupil rolls present an opportunity to consider how school funding is allocated. The Department for Education could increase per pupil funding without increasing spending overall. It should target additional support towards disadvantaged pupils, particularly the most disadvantaged, to help tackle the growing disadvantage gap – equivalent to 19 months of learning by the time pupils sit their GCSEs. We will be setting out proposals for how this could be achieved shortly.
As ever, we also recognise that schools alone cannot fix the inequalities that have risen as a result of austerity and a global pandemic. The newly formed cross-government Child Poverty Taskforce must adopt policies that lift children out of poverty, provide them with safe and warm housing, give them better access to health care (particularly mental health care) and support their families at the earliest possible opportunity.”
