Warning funding for schools in North Northamptonshire is at 'crisis point'
The Council's children services director's forecasting a 25-million pound budget deficit this financial year.
A local authority’s children’s director has said the system is at a “crisis point” with a forecast deficit of £25 million in school funding expected by the end of 2024/25.
North Northamptonshire Council (NNC) has said the demand pressures against the Dedicated Schools Grant (DSG) partly relate to increased demand for specialist education provision. It said that there was a 75 per cent increase in demand for EHCPs between January 2019 and January 2023.
The DSG is a funding pot from the government that is ringfenced for specifically spending on schools and education.
At a schools forum meeting on Thursday (October 17), NNC’s new director of children’s services, Charisse Monero, said the authority is lobbying senior-level colleagues at the Department of Education (DfE) about the council’s situation with school funding.
“I think there is an opportunity, and I think there have been missed significant opportunities to get our basic fundamentals right. We do not have a really robust early help offer in North Northamptonshire. Everything we do at the moment is very reactionary and very statutory-based.
“We are saying we are in a crisis point. I think the SEND system at the moment as a whole feels quite broken and there’s significant work that central government need to do, but that’s going to take a long time. So if we can lobby and leverage that now I think we need to do it.”
Independent provision is currently causing the biggest overspend on the DSG, forecasting an excess spend of £3.2m this year. NNC says the average cost of an independent special school placement is around £72k a year compared with an average of £22k in a maintained school or an
academy. There are currently 186 children attending independent school, but this is expected to rise further to around 250 before the financial year ends.
David Paice, assistant director for inclusion at North Northamptonshire, said there is “absolutely saving that could be and should be put in place”.
“The funding streams will need to be looked at with a sympathetic but degree of scrutiny for which we need to deliver better outcomes but for less money because actually the money isn’t there. The projection for this year is £25 million owed deficit- you can only imagine what will happen in the subsequent year if we don’t do something pretty radical pretty quickly.
“But then as a system that will not be enough. We can get our own systems right but the demand is so in excess of what the budget is coming in, if we all continue to operate as we are we will go bust.
“That has very very serious implications for everybody, most of all the young children who are not being well-served by us systemically despite everybody’s best intentions. We will have to operate differently and that will require a collective coming together.”
Where a local authority has an overall deficit on its DSG account at the end of the financial year they can carry the negative balance forward to the next year. It is then expected to eliminate that deficit when the next year of funding comes through.
Mr Paice added that the council’s issues had been raised at a ‘critical red flag level’ with the DfE ahead of a meeting with them next week.