Thousands of schools stand to lose out under new funding formula
Oops has something gone awry here- this seems in part to involve a positive redistribution to rural areas. I am sure the picture is less than straightforward but the article tells us:
Thousands of cash-strapped schools are set to lose further money from their budgets as a result of the government’s new funding formula unveiled by the education secretary, Justine Greening.
Under the proposals announced on Wednesday, more than 9,000 schools in England will lose funding, with money moving from London and other urban centres that have been well funded in the past to schools in areas that receive less money.
Almost 11,000 schools will gain from the redrafted formula, of which 3,400 will see increases of 5% to their funding. However, unions warned that even the so-called winners in the funding shakeup were likely to see their gains outweighed by real-terms cuts to their funding over the next three years.
The long-awaited new funding formula was announced on the same day that Whitehall’s spending watchdog, the National Audit Office, warned that schools in England were facing an 8% real-terms cut in funding per pupil by 2019-20 as a result of £3bn worth of cuts. The changes outlined in the new funding formula will mean further cuts on top of this for some schools.
Full details of which areas will win and lose were revealed in the Department for Education’s second consultation on its national funding formula, which aims to address historic gaps in funding between different areas that can amount to thousands of pounds per pupil.
More than 100 local authorities will see gains under the new formula – with the 10 lowest-funded local authorities gaining on average 3.6% – while almost 50 will see cuts to their funding. In 2018-19, the first year of the revised funding, Derby, York and Plymouth are among the winners, while the top five losers are London boroughs.