Funding for SEN in MS from April 2013

[messmonster]

Hi

Am hoping someone out there is knowledgeable on this....

I am aware that from next April higher needs SN children placed in mainstream schools will be funded under the "Place Plus" system.

My understanding (and do correct me if I'm wrong) is that the MS school will be expected to fund the first £6000 worth of support that any "higher needs" child requires and that the LEA will top this up if greater support is needed.

My questions are:

• where does the MS school get this £6k from? The school that my DD is due to attend has told me they had no surplus funds last year and that their current SEN budget allocation doesn't even cover the costs of their SENCO and usual SEN support work within the school (so they already top up their SEN budget out of normal school funds). I am now worried they won't have the budget to provide the first £6k of support that my DD needs. What would happen if they had applications from 3 "higher needs children" in a year - would they have to find £18K?

• approx how many hours of 1:1 does £6k equate to? I'm aware that currently schools are usually expected to fund 5 hours of 1:1 support but I am guessing £6k works out to be a lot more than that?

• why is a SN school given £10k per pupil and yet the same pupil in a MS setting is expected to be allocated £6k from the school budget?

Am I completely missing the point - just can't seem to fathom it despite (or maybe as a result of) reading the DofE Guidance doc.

Any insights gratefully received.

Why are you worrying about funding the schools job is to meet your childs need - the funding is not your problem?

Yes, you ARE missing the point. If the school mention funds again tell them to get an accountant if they can't figure out how to meet their statutory and legal duty to your child.

I'm worried because the suggestion's been floated that the school would not be able to accept my DD for a place if they don't have the budget to provide the 1:1 support she needs or, she could have the place but there would be a deficit in the amount of support on offer.

I'm just trying to educate myself so that I can be on top of the argument.

I don't know how much £ MS schools get for non SN pupils. I am guessing they would get the standard £ per pupil allowance for my DD and this £6k would have to pay for some of the additional support she needs.

Right. So. School doesn't have enough money to support your dd. what shoukd they do?

A) whine to parent and hope she reduces her expectations or take her child elsewhere?

B) Whine to the LA who is ultimately responsible for the education of each child and be careful to not mention any arguments with LA to vulnerable and stressed parent with already enough on her plate?

Schools get approx £4-5k per pupil - how much your school gets is on the DCSF League Tables site.

There isn't exactly a SN budget. There's one huge pot of which some is ring fenced for capital expenditure.

I think all the rest of it it is up to the school how they split it.

In the govs meeting we discuss how much goes into the SN pot. But that pot doesn't cover LSAs. That's part of the staff budget.....

So, essentially, your school has a staff budget, which the govs have agreed, and it's up to the HT how she spends that budget.

More experienced teachers cost more than NQTs, etc, etc.

If you find your school here you can find out:

• How much per pupil they get
• How much per pupil they spend
• How many teachers they have
• How many TAs they have
• Agv salary for teachers

And you can compare to neighbouring schools......

I would just echo what has been said. It is very unfair of school to talk to you like this. It is up to them to sort out the funding and be inclusive.

It costs more for bus companies to build buses with ramps or shops to provide disabled access but TOUGH frankly. If we want our children to grow up in a society where people are treated as equally valid and worthwhile, we have to get away from berating parents for the cost of their 'expensive' SN children.

I think this is the government doc

The intention as I understand it is to make it easier for parents to exercise a preference for a special school or an out of area school. LAs will often say as they fund their own schools already placing an individual child there is a 'nil cost' to them and so if a parent asks to go out of area they say that is an unreasonable use of funds - even to another mainstream school. The new formula intends to allocate a 'cost' to every place and so remove this argument.

A special school place will be £10,000 minimum cost to LA - some children / places will cost more. This means if your local special school costs £10k per place and the one in the next authority costs £10k per place you can choose either and the LA cannot argue the one over the border is costing £10k extra.

Mainstream schools have to put in £6000 per SN child on top of the £4,000 place cost for every child (with or without SN - called the AWPU). So the cost of placing a child with high needs in mainstream will be minimum £10k - the same as the special school. This stops LAs saying that placing a child in mainstream is nil cost.

Schools get the money through delegated funds as they always have - calculated on deprivation index - so they do not have to find an extra £6000 - the government wants all LAs to delegate funds up to £6000 for SN (+£4000 AWPU). This is to remove the situation where some LAs delegate highly eg schools have to put in first 20 hours of TA time) and others less (5-10 hours of TA time). This is because there have been legal cases where LAs argued the funds they had delegated to a school did not count when a mainstream placement was being compared to a specialist placement or when deciding whether to give a statement (so children in areas where lots of funds were delegated were far less likely to get a statement)

So in effect this is just a formula to recognise that placing SN children in LAs own schools is not nil cost - and therefore making it easier for parents to argue the financial cost of school A and school B is not as different as LAs have for years being making out.

My LA is very annoyed as it delegates 20 hours and is being asked to go back to only delegating 12 hours and it says it will have to write statements for children with 12-20 hours when it has not given these children statements for nearly 10 years.

None of this should make any difference to an individual child. It probably won't even change the actual budget your school gets. Its just a paper exercise to try and recognise the actual cost of placing children in settings.

It is also designed to help parents make a preference for Academies and Free schools - so for e.g. a LA cannot use the argument that it would cost more to send a SN child to an academy or free school than one of its own schools just because it would have to transfer money from a different budget.

Thanks so much for all the replies and in particular to Agnes for the detailed explanation of the proposals.

The link in Agnes post is the right one and this is the particular document I was referring to.

I'm so sorry if I'm being thick but can I just ask you Agnes to explain this a little more...

Schools get the money through delegated funds as they always have - calculated on deprivation index - so they do not have to find an extra £6000 - the government wants all LAs to delegate funds up to £6000 for SN (+£4000 AWPU).

Does this mean that a school tells their LA we have a higher needs child on our roll for Academic year 13/14 and the LA then allocates £6k to their delegated funds for that coming year?

Agnes, fantastic post. I shall save that explanation!!

Me too! Saved onto threads I'm watching!

No the LA delegates a pot of money to each school - the size of the pot is based on size of school, levels of deprivation / poverty in catchment etc.

The LA then tells all schools in their area (who will have got different size pots) what level of support they must put in from these delegated resources say 12 hours per week TA time.

The pot includes all SN money so for school action, action plus and first x hours of a statement

Some schools with few SN children will be quids in. Some who attract more SN kids than their pot allows will lose out. If a school gets a lot more SN children or a particularly expensive child there is usually a way of asking LA for extra funds. This is especially the case here for village schools. It is recognised the formula will not always work so there has to be contingencies eg if a school in an affluent area with a small pot of money attracts lots of high needs children.

So no the school do not ask the LA for £6k for a particular child. They use £6k from the pot of money they already have. However if they found themselves having to find lots of £6k they could go back to the LA and say we need more - but that would not usually be specific to one child - more a recognition they had taken more than their fair share of high needs children.

If a school is saying no money you can ask them what their SN delegated budget is and what they have spent it on. Lots of schools will use it for dubious purposes and call it wave 1 sn provision e.g. one school here spent it on the nursery playground, put in a few sensory items and used the SN budget and then when a child in nursery was dx'd with asd told the parent there was no money left for 1:1!

It is not the parent's argument if the school say no money. Its for the LA to decide if the school does or does not have enough money already allocated and to ask the school to account for it.

However some schools will actively discourage SN kids because they don't want to have to use the money for 1:1 for a particular child when they can use it for TAs generally.

Agnes for the further clarification. I really appreciate it and now understand how it works. Thanks so much for taking the time to post so much detail

So schools will be looking for ways to avoid the cost of a SEN child, and ways of delaying/denying need.?

V useful Agnes! Am I right also that basically local councils get all their funding from a central government education pot - for 'normal' kids, special needs and also the "high needs block" which caters for SN kids who need more than just mainstream. So, as long as the LA predicts correctly how many lots of £6000 etc they need, plus which kids need more on top, they get it from the Dept. of Education pot. So its not out of their own local budget, in effect. And that pot is then carried forwards next year.

I am no expert but I coudn't see anything too suspicious in the new funding methodology?

Am I missing something, eg on out-of-borough SN funding?

Every LA operates differently right now.

For example, in Hampshire there is talk of 'high incidence' and 'low incidence' statements. The concept is that 'high incidence needs' are needs which most schools are likely to find at some point - S&L delay/disorder, EBSD, Global Developmental Delay, etc., then 'Low incidence' would be ASD, Downs' Syndrome, Deafness, Blindness, Physical Disability, etc.

The 'high incidence' statements would not be specifically funded for each child with a statement, but rather each school gets a delegated budget to meet the needs of such children and the Statement merely sets out what the school must do.

The 'low incidence' statements would come with a pot of money specifically to meet that child's needs and that money would move with the child, if they move setting.

In my ex, ASD was considered high incidence and therefore schools were expected to cater for those children from within budget. Schools were told and believed that children with ASD would not get statements unless they were needing a special school.

"Am I right also that basically local councils get all their funding from a central government education pot - for 'normal' kids, special needs and also the "high needs block" which caters for SN kids who need more than just mainstream."

yes i think so

So, as long as the LA predicts correctly how many lots of £6000 etc they need, plus which kids need more on top, they get it from the Dept. of Education pot. So its not out of their own local budget, in effect.

no its based, at least initially, on formula to do with deprivation, free school meals etc not on how many high needs children actually exist in the area and on historical info on deprivation. So this is where you could get a mismatch. Each LA will have done their own modelling on this and you should be able to see a list eg on council minutes, school forum minutes or by FOI. Schools in affluent areas could lose out eg here the hospital in the affluent area is much better at dx asd than the hospital in the deprived area so in one part there are going to be more dx'd children wanting statements than there are funds and in the other probably funds to spare.

As far as I understand it LAs will get money in 3 chunks early years block, school block, high needs block - the first £6k comes out of schools block and top up from high needs block which LA retains (this is also used for central services like outreach etc). In some areas LAs have delegated high needs money to schools and will now need to pull this back and keep it centrally. In some situations it could be a good thing as high needs money is in effect being ring fenced for children with high needs, not used for action plus but yes are bound to be schools who have been used to using SEN money to put TAs in classes to help teachers being fed up the TA now needs to be used for 1 child.

Original DFE info is here
To be honest the detail is beyond me but as far as I can tell its not based on how many high needs children go to a particular school as schools will have a notional sen budget - perhaps after the first year or so the data on actual children will be used.

In the operational guidance (para 50) it says: Where necessary, local authorities will be able to provide additional funding for mainstream schools or Academies where the number of their high needs pupils cannot be reflected adequately in their formula funding. As such, in addition to the tasks above, local authorities may also define the circumstances in which additional funding would be provided from the High Needs Block. We suggest that this should be done on the basis of a set of agreed principles
which I assume means LAs should be able to give a school which attracts more high needs children than its notional sen budget, more money - which I guess is what parents should be saying to schools who say the money will not stretch

You should also be able to see what each school's notional budget is so schools will no longer be able to hide how much sen money they get it should be transparent - they have to tell the LA what they will provide for the money

You would never believe this is the govt that wants a smaller state and less interference!