Deputy Director Tom Goldman said funding for the conference would 'probably' need to change over time.
Deputy Director Tom Goldman said funding for the conference would 'probably' need to change over time.
The government is “actively considering” reforming the £10,000 funding special schools receive per child. This amount has not been increased since it was introduced 10 years ago.
Tom Goldman, deputy director of the Department for Education's funding policy unit, told a meeting of the National Special Schools Network today that funding would “probably” have to change over time.
Special schools receive £10,000 for each referral place and receive additional funding from the council depending on the needs of the children.
Special school business leaders told Goldman and David Withey, chief executive of the Education and Skills Funding Agency, that their budgets were underfunded or in deficit.
Goldman Sachs said the logic behind place funding is that it is thought to provide a “certain position” compared to additional funding, which is “variable and volatile.”
But he said the failure to raise the £10,000 due to inflation had left “balance far from a certainty” on the budget.
“Should £10,000 change over time? “Maybe,” he said.
He added that increasing this amount “may lead to further complexity” in how top-up funds are set up. “We chose £10,000 in 2013 but a very strange situation arises that doesn’t change, so this is what we will do. “We are actively looking at the present.”
The DfE previously said the £10,000 funding was “not intended to reflect rising costs for schools” and should instead be lowered to account for any further cost increases.
But analysis by Special Needs Jungle found that levels of additional funding remained stagnant in a third of councils between 2018 and last year.
‘The goal is to avoid bankruptcy’
They estimated that static £10,000 funding meant schools faced projected cuts of £1.3 billion in real terms.
Goldman said some had suggested a “more radical step” of removing places funding for the DfE, using a national funding formula instead, and “obviously building on that because it's not suitable for these children”.
“That is something we will need to think about again in the future, and we need to think about it in the context of wider SEND policy reform.
“I don’t want to design a funding system that might be better suited to today and introduce it at a time when it might not be better suited to the system actually in place.”
As part of its plans to improve SEND and alternative provision, the DfE plans to introduce a national approach to provide funding bands and tariffs for more “consistent funding” across the country after 2025.
In recent years, several Congresses have issued Section 114 bankruptcy declarations. Goldman said none of these are related to the current high demand shortage, but “there could be, and our goal is obviously to make sure that doesn't happen.”
Currently, 38 councils have signed safety valve deals with the government, agreeing to sweeping reforms in return for bailouts.