Councils are effectively slicing up to 9 per cent of maintained school budgets, a Schools Week investigation has found – and the true cost could be higher when other charges are factored in.
The findings challenge claims from academy sceptics that trusts charge their schools greater amounts than councils for services away from the classroom.
Steve Rollett, the deputy chief executive of the Confederation of School Trusts (CST), said: “School trusts are very upfront about costs for shared services. This investigation highlights how local authorities can take similar amounts, but the data is much less transparent [than for trusts] and as a result likely only the tip of iceberg.”
Through Freedom of Information, we obtained figures from 17 of England’s biggest local authorities showing how much they de-delegated from school budgets for core services.
We also asked for the number of schools that bought into traded services and how much they paid. The figures were used to calculate the size of an average school budget, de-delegation and how much a school stumped up for traded services.
Leeds charged schools the most (9 per cent). They were able to buy into 37 separate traded services, including HR, catering, cleaning educational psychology and pest control.
‘Scale MATs can’t match’
Three other councils took on average 6 per cent of school budgets, with County Durham offering services such as building and facilities, SEND and ICT support, and swimming and music lessons.
Jim Murray, Durham’s head of education, said the high take-up reflected the size of the area it covered and the “quality and value for money of the services we provide”.
Other councils in our sample charged between 1 and 4 per cent.
But Yusuf Erol, of chartered accountancy firm Langbrook Finance, said this was “likely [to] reflect both minimal de-delegation and limited traded service offers” from councils. In these instances, schools were either sourcing these services independently from other providers – and having to pay out more for that – or delivering them in-house using their own staff.
However, Hampshire, which charges 1 per cent, said there were “very few” services that its schools had to secure themselves. “[The council] benefits from economies of scale that academy trusts cannot match.”
Erol noted that councils also can’t mandate schools to buy into traded services or impose a central charge in the way trusts dd, which makes comparisons with MATs difficult.
Large MATs top slice on average 5.5 per cent, while the smallest take 8.8 per cent.
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