A London council launched a £200,000-a-year urgent repairs grant for its poorest schools – only to be ordered by government officials to withdraw the cash.
Barnet council wanted to move the cash from its dedicated schools grant reserves for “urgent and unbudgeted repairs” to its worst-off authority-maintained schools.
However, the Education and Skills Funding Agency stepped in to ban the move before it got off the ground – saying revenue costs could not be capitalised.
School buildings expert Tim Warneford said the case highlighted “the obvious gap between any school’s capacity and resources to adequately maintain their estate”.
“There are insufficient [capital] funds across the entire sector. They are having to triage and prioritise emergency running repairs as best as they can, but demand outstrips their budgets at every level,” he said.
Barnet said the cash would have only been given to schools in deficit, and for work deemed “essential”. It planned to offer £200,000 for works every year until 2027.
Nearly a third of Barnet’s 80 authority-maintained schools were in deficit by the end of March 2023.
However, the ESFA received a complaint from a local headteacher over high-needs allocations. This led to government officials “looking through the minutes of recent schools forum meetings” and unearthing the fund.
School forum minutes, published earlier this year, suggested this was “noncompliant with the updated school and early years finance and childcare regulations 2024” the ESFA said, adding: “As a result of this, the local authority needed to withdraw this fund.”
A council spokesperson noted the authority “was looking at ways to find additional funding for schools with budgetary difficulties and so we looked at dedicated schools grant (DSG) funding as a potential source”. But the ESFA “informed us that this was not possible”.
Schools will have to dig into pockets
Barnet confirmed schools would now have to dig into their pockets to pay for the repairs.
Local authorities receive ‘condition’ funding directly from the government annually.
Schools also receive a smaller sum directly, called devolved formula capital, which Warneford described as a “totally insufficient… basic maintenance fund”.
Last year, a National Audit Office report revealed that the government estimated it needed £5.3 billion in annual capital funding to “maintain schools and mitigate the most serious risks of building failure”.
The Department for Education requested £4 billion a year for 2021 to 2025 from the Treasury, but it was only allocated £3.1 billion. This amounted to a “significant gap”.
The “limited funding” had forced councils and academy trusts to “prioritise elements of school buildings in the worst condition leaving less to spend on effectively maintaining the other structures and enhancing or developing their estate”.
In a letter to the Public Accounts Committee last year, Hampshire council said it managed “an estimated condition liability of circa £420 million”.
It argued that its school condition allocation “of £23 million is insufficient” to keep pace “with the deterioration of its aging estate or to improve buildings to an appropriate standard for effective learning”.
This means that some of its buildings that are already “over 50 years old and with defects… will wait a further 20 years to be improved”.
Warneford said that the case in Barnet “suggests [the DfE] have been pretty inflexible in terms of understanding the reality on the ground”, adding: “There just isn’t enough money to meet the rate of dilapidation of our aging stock.”
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