Lord Storey – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Education

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Lord Storey on 2016-01-13.

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what support they are able to provide to schools in rural areas with attached swimming pools where the age weighted pupil unit is not sufficient to support the operation of such facilities.

Lord Nash

The Department distributes revenue funding to local authorities through the Dedicated Schools Grant. Each local authority receives a fixed level of schools revenue funding per pupil. The local authority is then responsible for designing a local funding formula, in consultation with its schools forum, which must include an age-weight pupil unit (per pupil funding attracted by each pupil at a school) of at least £2,000 per pupil for primary schools, and £3,000 for secondary schools. In consultation with its school forum, the local authority has the flexibility to set rates higher than these minimum levels. There are two further optional factors that are particularly relevant for rural schools: the lump sum and the sparsity factor. It is for individual schools to manage their budgets within the total provided to them, determined by the local formula.

The Department publishes all local authorities’ funding formulae on GOV.UK.