Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what (a) methodology and (b) data the Department uses to (i) calculate and (ii) compare the average cost of maintained special school placements and independent school placements.

For maintained special schools and special academies, the department uses local authorities’ actual expenditure on high needs top-up funding, to which is added the £10,000 per place funding using pupil numbers from the January school census, divided by those pupil numbers to produce an average placement cost.

For independent special schools (ISS), the department cannot disaggregate this expenditure from that including non-maintained special schools (NMSS), so creates a combined average placement cost by adding spending on ISS fees, top up funding for NMSS and the total £10,000 per place funding for NMSS (using the number of pupils with education, health and care (EHC) plans at NMSS), and dividing by the number of pupils with EHC plans at both ISS and NMSS.