How is school funding determined?

[roisin]

I'm intrigued. Does anyone know much about how schools are funded? I know this year the pupil premium came in, so it's changed.

But figures for last year (just released from DfE - available on BBC website, but no data for Academies) show my local schools per head figure ranging from £4711 to £5792. Most of the local schools getting well below the National average for Non-London schools (£5128), despite this being an area with high levels of deprivation.

Funding is horrendously complicated.
At a national level I am not even going to attempt to explain how the figures are derived - even the DfE have problems explaining it, but each LA is given what is called the GUF (guaranteed unit of funding) and it varies dramatically from one LA to another. So Leicestershire is the LA which gets the smallest GUF per pupil and Tower Hamlets the highest apart from London City that only has own school. That is where your national average figure is coming from.
The LA gets all the GUFs and then splits the funding into two - one part is the individual schools budget and the other is called central spend. The central spend is what is retained by the LA to fund a range of things, the most important of which is usually SEN funding. So some of that funding does get to schools, just not directly. The ratio of central spend to Individual School Budgets also varies from one LA to another, though there are controls in place to limit the amount by which central spend can increase.
The individual school budget is determined by another funding process which also changes from LA to LA. If you want to look at your LAs formula then you need to find the Section 251 report, which will be somewhere on the LA website and this also gives breakdown for individual schools. However most LAs have a funding system that gives out funding based on the number of pupils and also specific funding around deprivation, management time, school building issues among others. Just to make it even more interesting each pupil is worth a different amount of funding depending on their age. This is called the AWPU (age weighted pupil unit), so normally a junior pupil is considered to be the lowest funded, followed by infant and then KS3/4.
Just to make it even more complicated 6th formers are currently funded by a totally separate funding organisation, who are actually going to take over all funding in the near future.
Pupil premium sits outside all this. Every pupil who is currently in receipt of Free School Meals gets an extra £488. From April 2012 that will rise to approximately £600. I say approximately because the total amount of funding has been fixed but the DfE has changed the way that it is allocated and from April any pupil that has been entitled to FSM in the last 6 years will be eligible for the Pupil Premium, so they are not currently sure how many pupils will be covered.

Wow!

This is how it works. If you are in Devon, you get less than practically anywhere else. :( That's a general rule of tumb that applies to practically everything, btw, not just school funding. :( :(

Yes funding is complicated. I came across this video vimeo.com/215811967 recently that summarises how the planned school funding cuts are going to affect different regions. It sounds like Head Teachers are campaigning and mobilising to make the government listen - how terrifying that they are forced to do this just to make sure their schools are providing the basics for our kids! We as parents should be writing to our MPs at the very least. Share the video to get message out to more parents
vimeo.com/215811967

If Labour win the election won't they halt the 'fair funding formula' and poorly funded areas such as Devon, Derby and West Sussex won't receive the extra cash they are expecting next year? Are Labour promising to restore school funding to 2013/14 levels or just promising to make no further cuts?

I think that you will need to wait until the Labour manifesto comes out to have the first clue what their policies will be on school funding and eve then it might not be clear.
If they did decide to halt the new national funding formula and go back to the current funding then it will cause total chaos because time is getting very short for changes from April 2018. It sounds like a long time but in funding terms for schools in getting everything organised at LA and school level it is getting very short.

admission - thank you for answering.