OFSTEAD RATING AND FINANCE?

[dollysoup]

Hi, Do schools get more money for having a good or poor Oftsed rating? Specifically, does a poor Behavior rating enable a school to get more funding for counsellors/ clinical psychologists?

No - Ofsted rating has no impact on school finance directly. Indirectly, better Ofsted means more students want to go and therefore the school budget is healthier.

But funding for counsellors is not linked to Ofsted. If school want or need to offer that they need to find it in their general school budget. Some may use pupil premium funding for it, if it’s those students who are in need.

Hi,
Thanks for the reply sometimesravensometimestimesparott. Excuse my ignorance again - what is a general school budget? How do the government fix these numbers?

So schools need good behavior, so they get more money? How can the schools get good behavior? I was trying to think about how behaviour problems start - bullying, peer pressure, misunderstandings, critical staff who do not mean to be critical, children being abused at home, exam pressure, children from different locations arguing, negative media influences, children being over tired or ill, children living in poverty and blaming the families. Can please anyone tell me what works best when helping children in schools?

The 'general school budget' is a per-pupil amount of money that schools get from the government, calculated from the school census each year. So, if a school is popular and has 30 children in every class, then it will get more money than a school that's undersubscribed so has an average of maybe 25 in a class. It's tough for less popular schools, because that (say) 5 pupil difference is not far off the cost of employing the class teacher - but the cost saving from having 5 fewer children in the class is negligible. So more popular schools might find they have more money available to pay for (eg) a school counsellor.

There are also other factors that are taken into account when funding schools (eg a school will get more money if it has a higher deprivation index, more FSM pupils, more EAL pupils etc), but it's the pupil numbers 9that makes the biggest difference.

The amount of money a school gets is nothing to do with the good or bad behaviour of its pupils.

Bad behaviour in schools is a very complex problem with lots of causes. Some of the things you mention are not causes of bad behaviour. Schools do not really have the power to deal with really problematic behaviour properly. Most really badly-behaved kids have pre-existing issues before they arrive in secondary school. What works best to help them depends on the individual student and what their issues are.

It would help if you could provide the context of what you’re asking?
good behaviour is only one factor that might influence parents to send children to a school, Ofsted is another, locations….loads of things.
School budget and behaviour have nothing to do with each other, so it’s difficult to understand what you’re asking.

in terms of what works best to help children in schools, it depends on the children and the school - there isn’t a one size fits all answer, or it would have been done.

A poor Ofsted rating will trigger more support for the school and a focus on the areas in which the school is deemed to be weak.

The school gets a sum of money per student, plus money which is intended to support students who need extra help, in whatever form.

In fact, outstanding selective state schools often have a lower per capita spend - £5-5k or even less rather than the £6.5k average- as the allowance per capita is quite heavily influenced by other factors such as pupils on pupil premium and local weighting (whether you are in London, for example).