Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what the (a) initial and (b) additional allocated budgets for special needs provision in Solihull schools have been in each of the last five years.

Local authorities are required to provide schools with sufficient funds to enable mainstream schools to meet the additional cost of pupils with special educational needs (SEN) and disabilities, up to the value of £6,000. This funding comes from the schools’ block of the dedicated schools grant. While authorities will identify a notional SEN budget for each school within the school’s overall budget, that notional budget is not ring-fenced, and schools are expected to manage their overall budget to best meet the need of all their pupils, including pupils with SEN.

When the costs of additional support required for a pupil with SEN exceed £6,000, the local authority should also allocate additional top-up funding to cover the excess costs. This top-up funding, and all funding for special schools comes from the local authority’s high needs budget. In December 2018, we announced an additional £250 million in high needs funding across the current financial year and the next, bringing Solihull’s total high needs funding to £27.2 million in 2018-19.

The schools and high needs allocations for Solihull since 2013-14 are as follows:

[1] The 2015-16 schools funding allocation includes £9.39 million transferred through the Non-Recoupment Academies Cash Transfer. This is therefore not a like-for-like comparison with 2014-15 funding figures.