Schools National Funding Formula
The wisdom of crowds
The Department for Education has always funded schools in England. Until the mid-1980s the government funded the local authority, and the local authority looked after the schools – it was the local authority that spent the money, not the school. Indeed, apart from writing an annual cheque to the local authority, national government really had very little to do with schools back in the day.
It was the local authority, for example, who decided how many exercise books a school needed, procured them and send them to the school. As a child I wrote in books that said “KCC” on the back – they had been purchased by Kent County Council. We used to run out every year, and pupils would be told not to start our homework on a new page. The school would ring the council and beg for more exercise books. It certainly didn’t have a budget to buy books itself.
Then along came “local management of schools”, from which over time has sprung the academies' programme. Schools, not local authorities, would have financial control. But how much should go to each school? Over time all sorts of rules and customs emerged, but they were not coherent or fair. Schools got a “guaranteed unit of funding”, quite rightly known as GUF. And how big was a school’s GUF? It depended on how much the school received in previous years. Unfairness was baked in.
I was told that every Secretary of State since Ken Baker in the 1980s wanted to create a National Funding Formula, but it had always defeated the brightest minds inside and outside the department. It was easy to invent a formula, but the result ended up with massive winners and losers – and was politically unviable as a result. Or the total bill would be so large that the Treasury was just say no.
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