Bim Afolami

Significant cash increases to school funding will help schools to manage these higher costs. Overall, core schools funding (including funding for both mainstream schools and high needs) is increasing by £4 billion in 2022/23 compared to the previous year.

Schools in Hitchin and Harpenden are attracting £81.6 million in total this year, a 4% cash increase. This reflects 3% more per pupil in their pupil-led funding compared to 2021/22. Schools’ actual allocations in 2022/23 will be based on local authorities’ local funding formulae.

On top of this funding through the National Funding Formula, schools in Hitchin and Harpenden are seeing £2.4 million through the Schools Supplementary Grant.

Schools will also benefit from the Energy Bill Relief Scheme, which will run until at least the 31 March 2023. This will reduce how much schools need to spend on their energy, and give schools greater certainty over their budgets over the winter months.

Any school which has signed a fixed energy contract since April 2022 will be eligible for support if, at the time they signed their contact, wholesale prices for the next 6 months were expected to be higher than the Government supported price of £211/MWh for electricity, and £75/MWh for gas.

For example, a school which uses 10 MWh of electricity and 22 MWh of gas a month and signed a fixed contract giving them a current monthly energy bill of about £10,000, would receive support based on the difference between expected wholesale prices when they signed their contract and the Government supported price. For a contract signed in July 2022, this could be worth £240/MWh for electricity and £70/MWh for gas, meaning the school receives a discount of £4,000 per month, reducing their original bill by 40%.

Support will also be available to schools on variable, deemed and other contracts.

There will be a review in 3 months time to determine how the scheme should best be targeted beyond this period to focus support on vulnerable sectors.

The details of the scheme can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/energy-bill-relief-scheme-help-for-businesses-and-other-non-domestic-customers.

More broadly, the Department allocates annual capital funding to improve the condition of school buildings, including through improving energy efficiency. The Department has allocated over £13 billion in condition funding since 2015, including £1.8 billion this financial year. In addition, the School Rebuilding Programme will transform 500 schools over the next decade, with all new buildings delivered through the programme designed to be net zero carbon in operation. Schools can also access funding specifically for carbon reduction and energy efficiency measures through the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy’s Public Sector Decarbonisation Fund.

Every school’s circumstances are different, and where schools are in serious financial difficulty, they should contact their local authority or the Education and Skills Funding Agency.

To qualify for student finance in England, a person must have settled status or a recognised connection to the UK. This includes persons who are covered by EU law, have long residence in this country, or who have been granted international protection by the Home Office.

Subject to meeting the normal eligibility requirements, Hong Kong British Nationals (overseas) status holders will qualify for student finance once they have acquired settled status in the UK, as is the case for the majority of persons who are on a five-year route to settlement.

Schools in Hitchin and Harpenden are attracting £4,862 per pupil through the schools national funding formula (NFF) in the 2021-22 financial year. This will increase to £5,007 per pupil in the 2022-23 financial year and is based on notional school-level NFF allocations.

The department is investing a further £4.7 billion by the 2024-25 financial year for the core schools budget in England, over and above the Spending Review 2019 settlement for schools in 2022-23.

This includes a further £1.6 billion for schools and high needs in 2022-23, on top of the notional school-level NFF allocations set out above. The department will announce the distribution of this additional funding for 2022-23 shortly. The department will make announcements on the breakdown of the 2023-24 and 2024-25 financial year core school budget in due course.

The department is conducting a competition to deliver our manifesto commitment to establish 8 more high quality Institutes of Technology (IoT). The selected 8 will join the 12 IoTs that have already been established. While it would not be appropriate to comment on the merits of any individual proposal, the department can confirm that we have received an application for the Hertfordshire area. Proposals are being assessed and we plan to announce the outcome of the competition in the autumn.

The number of pupils attending independent schools in England in each year since 2010 is published in table 1a of the ‘Schools, pupils and their characteristics’ statistical release. This can be found at:

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/schools-pupils-and-their-characteristics-january-2019.

Information on the nationality of pupils is not collected and information on children attending schools in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland is the responsibility of the devolved administrations.

The information requested is not held centrally. Children with special educational needs are funded through the schools and high needs national funding formulae, which have been separate since 2013. Local authorities and schools have statutory duties under the Children and Families Act (2014) to support children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities. However, we do not prescribe in detail how local authorities should allocate their high needs funding, or how schools should use their funding.

The total funding amounts for schools, and for high needs, since 2013 are as follows:

The most recent OECD data shows that the UK spent at least as much per pupil on state school education as any other G7 nation, apart from the United States.

Information on revenue funding by constituency is not held centrally and funding is not allocated separately for primary and secondary pupils. However, the below table shows the revenue and funding for schools in Hertfordshire and England since 2005.

This table does not include capital funding, which is not available by local areas prior to 2011-12. The Department’s total capital budget for education nationally from 2011-12 to 2016-17 was over £29 billion.

Hertfordshire local authority directly received over £340 million of core capital allocations from the Department between financial years 2011-12 to 2016-17. These figures do not include funding to academies, sixth-form colleges and multi academy trusts within the area.

The 2011 and 2012 data only include local authority (LA) maintained schools, all other years combine academies and LA maintained schools.

As these figures are at school level they are sensitive to changes in average school size.

The government is allocating £6 billion in high needs funding to local authorities in 2018/19. Local authorities are required to delegate funds to a level that enables schools to meet the additional cost of pupils with Special Educational Needs (SEN) up to £6,000 per annum, and should also allocate additional top-up funding to cover excess costs when required. The local authority can also choose to give additional funding from its high needs budget to schools that have a disproportionate number of pupils with SEN.

If a school has concerns about the level of funding they receive for their pupils with SEN, they should discuss those concerns with their local authority. For further information, please see paragraph 81 of the high needs funding operational guide, available at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/high-needs-funding-arrangements-2018-to-2019.

Studying part-time and later in life can bring enormous benefits for individuals, the economy and employers. That is why the Government has taken steps to help hardworking people who want to gain new skills and advance their careers by studying part-time. These measures include offering financial support in the form of loans to cover fees and, from 2018/19, maintenance costs. We have also enshrined in law the need for the new higher education sector regulator, the Office for Students, to have regard for part-time study.

The government will set out further details of the review in due course.

The Government is developing a modern Industrial Strategy which aims to increase employee wages through education and training. This will help workers achieve their career aspirations and increase their earning potential.

We are investing up to £40 million to pilot new approaches for career-long learning. The first of these pilots – the Flexible Learning Fund - was launched in October. This Fund provides up to £10 million to support projects designed to improve access to training for working adults with low or intermediate skills.

We will maintain current average levels of investment in farming of £2.4 billion per year in England over the life of this Parliament. All funding released from reductions in Direct Payments are being re-invested into delivering new schemes that contribute to our three goals: supporting viable businesses, maintaining food production at its current level, and achieving animal health, welfare and climate outcomes.

For example, we are introducing three new schemes that reward environmental benefits including the Sustainable Farming Incentive which farmers and land managers can now apply online for.

Defra has also launched the new Farming Investment Fund which offers funding for equipment, technology, and infrastructure that improves farm productivity and benefits the environment.

Last October, we launched the Farming Innovation Programme with an initial £17.5 million, which encourages groups of farmers, growers, businesses, and researchers to get involved in collaborative research and development. This will support and drive adoption of new innovation by farmers and growers to ensure it can make a real difference.

Since 2020, farmers have continued to receive financial support for delivering environmental outcomes through the Environmental Stewardship and Countryside Stewardship agri-environment schemes. Since 2021, Defra has made a number of changes to improve the application process for farmers for Countryside Stewardship, and updated payment rates.

We work closely with the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities to ensure that planning supports agriculture and food production as well as delivering other goals. This is reflected in the National Planning Policy Framework. The Framework makes clear that local planning authorities should take into account all the benefits of the best and most versatile agricultural land.

Where significant development of agricultural land is shown to be necessary, planning authorities should seek to use poorer quality land in preference to that of a higher quality.

Farming in England is now going through the biggest change in a generation. As government, our approach to working with the farming sector is changing too. Food is still the primary purpose of farming, and always will be. But if we want farming and food production to be resilient and sustainable over the long term, then farming and nature can and must go hand in hand.

In 2022 we started to roll out some core elements of the Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI). We will gradually expand the scheme until all elements are available from 2024/25 onwards. In its early years, the scheme will focus on supporting and maintaining environmentally sustainable farming improvements that most farmers can make, such as soil and livestock management, pesticide use and fertiliser use. The core elements of the SFI that are available as of June 2022 are: arable and horticultural soils standard; improved grassland soils standard; and moorland standard which will be followed by the Annual Health and Welfare Review.

Local Nature Recovery is the improved and more ambitious successor to the Countryside Stewardship scheme in England. It will pay for locally-targeted actions to make space for nature in the farmed landscape and the wider countryside, alongside food production. We plan to make an early version of the scheme available to a limited number of people in 2023 as part of our plans for testing and rolling out the scheme. We will then roll out the scheme across the whole country by the end of 2024.