DfE announces High Needs funding boost
The Secretary of State has announced an additional £250 million to local authorities for High Needs Funding in England over the next two years, saying that the additional investment will help local councils to manage those pressures, whilst being able to invest to provide more support.
The funding is not new money from the Treasury- it is a redistribution of underspent school funding, which is available because the government over-estimated pupil numbers.
It will be allocated on the basis of the 2 to 18-year-old population in each local authority, which is also the criteria used to allocate a large proportion of funding in the High Needs Funding Formula.
Speaking in a recent Schools North East webinar on High Needs Funding, school finance expert Julie Cordiner criticised the DfE’s reliance on a population factor for allocating funding. She argued that this approach ignores the more random incidence of need and, in any event, cost pressures are driven by the complexity of need, not levels of incidence. Under the approach the DfE has pursued, two areas with the same number of pupils would get the same amount of money even if they provided very different levels of SEND support.
Allocations for the North East in the current year are shown below. It shows the variance in funding per pupil with EHCP or SEN support, where areas with higher incidence have actually received less additional funding per pupil.
