Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, whether his Department is taking steps to ensure that specialist schools in Barnsley have sufficient resources to teach people who have severe autism.

We recognise the challenges that special schools face supporting pupils with high levels of need, that is why base funding is set at a much higher level of £10,000 per place. On top of this, local authorities provide top up funding to reflect additional need in respect of individual pupils. The level of the top-up funding is a matter for agreement between the local authority and the school, and we do not prescribe in detail how local authorities should allocate their high needs funding.

To assist local authorities in making sure that special schools have sufficient resources, in 2018-19 we have provided Barnsley with £21.9 million in high needs funding, 3.1% more than they planned to spend in 2017-18. These allocations can be found at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/dedicated-schools-grant-dsg-2018-to-2019.