Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, whether she has made a comparative assessment of the impact (a) price and (b) wage inflation on school budgets for schools (i) in and (ii) outside the f40 network.

Each year the Department publishes an assessment of schools’ costs and funding, which looks at mainstream schools in England at the national level. The Department recognises that this assessment will not reflect the position of each individual school, and that different schools will face different financial challenges, including schools in the Local Authorities represented by the f40.

The purpose of the schools national funding formula (NFF), which allocates the great majority of school funding in England, is not to give every school the same level of per pupil funding. It is right that schools with more pupils with additional needs – such as those indicated by measures of deprivation, low prior attainment, or English as an additional language – receive extra funding to help them meet the needs of all their pupils.

Schools have autonomy and the responsibility to manage their budgets. The Department does not hold real time data on individual schools’ costs and spending decisions. It would not be right to base schools’ funding on the spending decisions of individual schools; schools’ funding is, rather, based on objective measures of comparative need.