Schools set to lose out on £370 million due to DfE error

[Postapocalypticcowgirl]

https://schoolsweek.co.uk/dfe-made-370m-error-in-school-funding-calculations/

"The government’s prediction for the minimum per-pupil funding for secondary schools has been revised down by £55. At primary level it’s down £45.
Based on these figures, the average secondary school would be £57,970 worse-off than predicted in July, and the average primary would be £12,420 worse-off."

In school terms, this is a large amount of money, at this stage in the year, the budget will already be allocated, and in many case it will be spent or cannot be reallocated. This will push some schools that were doing okay financially into deficit, and cause further financial struggles in many schools.

For many schools, the only way to save that money will be to look at staffing- if someone leaves in the middle of the year, they may not be replaced to save money.

I would say there are very few schools in the country (especially facing another winter of high fuel bills and increased costs) who can just absorb that loss in funding.

Surely as a bare minimum, the DfE should honour all the money they promised schools this summer? It just shows how incompetent the current government are, that something like this could even happen!

This is grim, but as I understand it it's not the budget for this year, but next and headteachers hadn't yet been told what their allocations would be so wouldn't have made any firm budget decisions?

They have to do 3 year budget projections each year.

No, but unless the school is running at a surplus, if a school knows they will be worse off than expected, then one way to make the books balance is to try and save some of the money this year.

Realistically, it will result in staffing cuts, whether this year or next year (unless something drastic happens like energy bills for schools falling significantly).

If heads know this is coming, then I think they will look at decisions they can make this year to try to make things a bit better next year?

We are running a deficit this year, and were hoping increases in funding (lagged due to increasing student numbers) next year would make the books balance. I'm assuming that now won't happen, and I don't know what happens next?

Ah right, I see what you mean. They didn't know the precise figures but knew it was meant to be more so could relax a bit.

I did see that £370 million would be equivalent to giving every teacher a 1.5% pay rise so it really is a huge amount of money being lost to schools.

Kebede is suggesting that this could re-open the pay dispute and lead to more strike action because the dispute was settled on the basis that the 6.5% would be properly funded and now it isn't.

https://schoolsweek.co.uk/grounds-to-reopen-pay-dispute-over-370m-funding-gaffe-says-neu-boss/

The article is v interesting in that it says he was called into an emergency meeting with the DfE at 5:30pm on Friday evening. Emergency meeting! They've known about this since the beginning of September.

The decision to call the meeting at 5:30pm on a Friday was a shitty political one. The DfE have been told off before for releasing crap announcements at that time and they had said that they would try hard in the future to avoid it. Fat lie.

It does mess up the three year budget plan. Its pretty normal to find year 3 looks unworkable in your plan, but you have time to adjust staffing, change contracts around and sometimes funding changes by the time you get there. But year 2 will now be looking like year 3 but 6 months away and being fairly sure no extra funds will materialise. If we want redundancies in September 24 the process starts in just 2-3 months.

Not that we want redundancied, but in order to not be in deficit (actual deficit not just in year deficit)