Schools will no longer receive additional funding from the government for summer schools, it has been confirmed.
The Education Funding Agency (EFA) today announced it would not continue the funding programme, which is aimed at helping disadvantaged children transition from primary to secondary school.
In June, 900 schools received a share of £9.7 million for summer schools, usually held for between one and two weeks in the school holidays.
A school can receive £250 per pupil, per week, of the summer school.
Research released earlier this year found summer schools had a “small positive effect on transition to secondary school”.
Schools will still be able to use their pupil premium funding for summer schools, but will not receive a separate allocation for them.
A Department for Education spokesperson said: “Providing educational excellence everywhere is at the heart of this Government’s drive to extend opportunity to all pupils.
“That is why we are protecting the core schools budget in real terms and the Pupil Premium rates for the duration of this parliament. Today’s announcement is the first step towards meeting that commitment.
“We are not stopping there though and are taking action to end the unfairness in the school funding system by introducing a national funding formula so every child, no matter where they live in the country, will be funded according to need – meaning areas with the highest need will attract the most funding.”
Experience – 20 plus years as CoG of a inner city primary school school.
A fairer funding is fine and welcome especially in resped of rural schools. However what Ms morgan is intending to do is
1. Resolve the proplem of historic underfunding of rural schoos at the the expense of inner city schools in deprived areas.
2. Return to the days of John Major of chronic underfunding of inner city primary schools – which was purely political and had nothing to do with education exellence for schools in deprived areas and every thing to do with giving more to those who have and paid for by those who have not – seems ‘fairness’ is a merely a convenient word.
3. It ha long been the ambition of the governments of the Thatcher, Major and the present government to remove both financial and authority control of state education from local authority involvement – ‘who pays the piper plays the tune’.
Gove was obsessed with Academies, seems Morgan is of the old school and that inner city education is an unfortunate consequence of government.
Terence
Bit shocked to be reading this! We’ve only just found this out quite by accident. Our Local Authority hasn’t told us yet about this, and we’re currently setting our budget in preparation for the next financial year, assuming this money is coming in! We’re also underway with our preparations for this year’s summer school. I guess that will all have to be cancelled…
We have run two weeks for young people in the local secondary school for the last 3 years attracting over 150 young people daily. Withdrawal of the funding will mean we will have to dramatically reduce our offer and go beg borrow and steal to run whatever we can as students, parents and carers in our deprived area, have come to enjoy and depend on a good two weeks break which many cannot otherwise afford!