The government’s education funding agency will be closed down, with its financial oversight for schools rolled into the regions groups.
The Education and Skills Funding Agency will be “integrated into the core Department for Education” by March next year, government said today.
The move will happen over two stages and give schools a “single point of contact for financial management and support”, government said.
The ESFA is currently an executive agency of the Department.
Schools financial support and oversight functions will transfer from October 1 and be brought together with the regions group, nine areas overseen by regional directors.
This will support the launch of regional improvement teams by January, government added, allowing a “single regulator model with governance and accountability sitting in one place”.
Education secretary Bridget Phillipson added: “This will provide a single seamless voice to schools and ensure that financial improvement is central to school improvement.”
Funding and assurance functions will be centralised on March 31 next year, when the ESFA will close.
It will enable a single, joined-up approach to funding and regulation to improve accountability
“Moving the agency functions back into the department will bring benefits to the individuals and organisations we support as well as to the taxpayer,” Phillipson added. “It will enable a single, joined-up approach to funding and regulation to improve accountability.
“We will be working closely with our staff, unions, stakeholders across the education sector to finalise and deliver our plans for closing the agency.”
‘Shifting deckchairs won’t solve funding issue’
As of July, 736 staff worked at ESFA.
DfE expects 95 per cent of ESFA staff to be retained. All staff will be able to stay within the wider department, if they choose.
Despite “not being the driving factor”, the move will result in “some efficiencies”, they added.
However the department would only say: “We can’t give an exact figure at this point, but it’s a small cost saving.”
The agency had already undergone a huge restructure after a review by Sir David Bell. The body was stripped of wide-ranging policy functions and lost half its staff.
Set up in 2017, the agency is responsible for delivering and assuring £75 billion of funding for 25,000 education settings – making it one of the biggest funding operations in government.
But the ESFA is the second education-related quango to get the axe under the new Labour government.
The Institute of Apprenticeships and Technical Education is expected to close by April with some functions transferred to Skills England, which is currently being set up.
Pepe Di’Iasio, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said: “If this reorganisation produces a more efficient and joined-up approach to the oversight of school and college funding that is obviously something we welcome.
“However, shifting the deckchairs will not solve the overriding problem that the current level of school and college funding is totally inadequate. This is the issue that we most need the government to address at the forthcoming autumn budget.”
David Withey, ESFA chief executive,added: “I am proud of the achievements of the ESFA – delivering timely and accurate funding, positive support to providers in financial stress and strong assurance to taxpayers on how their funding is used.
“That has been driven by the quality of our people, and I am really confident that our strong performance will continue as part of the department”
Appropriate strategic governance of education is indeed separate from fair and appropriate funding of education which is a vital strategic thread in its own right – both need fixing.
Just to cover the funding thread before I go back to governance / oversight. We need to add back the third F – Fair – that was part of the National Fair Funding Formula debate in 2014-15 but was dropped at the last when the NFF was implemented, because the re-distribution of funding from urban centres to rural centres was just too difficult, so the rural-urban divide remains, the millions in unmonitored additional education funding being the mechanism the DfE uses to hide it. The second funding thread that needs to be fixed is High-level needs funding which is simply not fit for purpose, but a subject worthy of an article in its own right.
Governance: Joined-up thinking (hopefully 0-19 education from nursery to sixth form) – tick, Regional structure (hopefully to maximise collaboration between regional counties and soften the differences in provision at the borders) – tick. What’s missing and it’s fundamental, is that any system of oversight that truly has optimum pupil outcomes as its raison d’etre has to be bottom up. Every child matters, so every teacher matters so every school matters. Schools have this largely right and governance is designed on the right principles but the necessary volunteers can be hard to resource, but the model is sound. The missing piece is that for every school to matter, it means that every county has to matter, and county governance has been the victim of an ongoing war for control between central and local politics. This is not a plea for a return to local government control of education. The cannot afford and could never afford 151 flavours of education policy at the whim of local big-wigs. The missing piece is a return to an LEA, but not overseen by local government; overseen by an education forum (extend existingschools forum) of 0-19 education providers, leaders and governors/trustees.
The lack of a fully defined bottom-up system of delivery and oversight probably means that this is the latest DfE overreach in its drive for absolute top-down, central control.