Schools are set to be hit by a “disastrous” levy as councils search for ways to replace a £600 million government funding pot being dropped from September.
Surrey County Council is proposing an annual levy on maintained schools to fund areas such as building projects, redundancies, pensions and curriculum assessments, TES can reveal.
Surrey’s levy would be worth around £60 per pupil each year, made up of £25.89 per pupil from September 2017, plus an additional £35.34 per pupil to subsidise music and performing arts services, according to a paper from a Surrey school forum meeting on 7 December, published last week.
The money would pay for areas currently funded by the Education Services Grant (ESG), which the government is reducing from April and cutting altogether from September.
Surrey is also proposing that its schools set aside a further £10.91 per pupil to pay for school improvement services. The average maintained secondary school in the area would pay £52,625 for the levy and a further £21,339 for school improvement services.
In November, the government said that it was allocating £50 million a year for school improvement funding, as well as establishing a £140 million “strategic school improvement fund’, from September 2017.
However, schools are facing severe financial pressures, largely due to rising workforce costs and real-terms funding cuts.
Valentine Mulholland, head of policy at the NAHT heads’ union said: “Although [the levy] will rely on the support of schools forums…this is a significant additional cost and not something schools will have factored in.
“With the additional cost of the apprenticeship levy from April, it’s disastrous. The £600 million of savings in ESG will just be taken out of school funding.”
This is an edited article from the 06 January edition of TES. Subscribers can read the full article here. This week’s TES magazine is available in all good newsagents. To download the digital edition, Android users can click here and iOS users can click here
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