Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, how much funding his Department has allocated to special needs provision in schools in Barnsley; and what the average allocation was for schools in England in each of the last five years.

Local authorities are required to provide mainstream schools with sufficient funds to enable them to meet the additional cost of pupils with special educational needs 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 special educational needs (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 needs 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 Barnsley’s total high needs funding to £22.2 million in 2018-19.

The schools and high needs allocations for Barnsley since 2014-15 are as follows:

As funding for special needs in mainstream schools’ budgets is not ring-fenced, the information on how much top-up funding Barnsley Council has allocated to the schools in Barnsley is not held centrally. It is not possible to provide a meaningful comparison of the average allocation for special needs provision in schools in Barnsley and England.

However, it is possible for Barnsley Council to compare their high needs spending with that of other local authorities using our high needs benchmarking tool which can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/high-needs-strategic-planning-fund.