Pupil Referral Units

(asked on 27th January 2022) - View Source

Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what support her Department is providing to Pupil Referral Unit schools that are not awarded special needs funding.


Answered by
Will Quince Portrait
Will Quince
This question was answered on 1st February 2022

Additional funding has been made available to the core schools budget for allocation in the 2022-23 financial year as a result of the 2021 Spending Review. The way that this funding is being allocated reflects differences in how pupil referral units (PRU), special schools and mainstream schools are funded.

Mainstream schools are funded through local funding formulae, and the extra funding allocated to the department following the 2021 Spending Review is being allocated in the 2022-23 financial year as a supplementary grant. This is because it was not possible for the department to decide on allocations, and for local authorities to include those within their local formulae, in time.

PRUs, special schools and the equivalent academies, on the other hand, are funded from the high needs block of the dedicated schools’ grant (DSG). In December 2021, the department announced additional allocations to local authorities of high needs DSG funding for the 2022-23 financial year, totalling £325 million. The differences in costs and funding for PRUs mean that centrally setting supplementary per-pupil funding rates, as we have done for the supplementary funding for mainstream schools, was not appropriate. Therefore, the department decided that it was better that local authorities decide how to allocate the additional funding to those types of schools, with the same flexibilities as they must deploy the rest of the DSG allocations of high needs funding.

PRUs should, therefore, discuss with their local authority any increases as part of the top-up funding paid from authorities’ high needs budgets. Each local authority now knows how much of the additional £325 million high needs funding it will be allocated in the 2022-23 financial year. Nationally, this is an increase of 4% to the high needs allocations announced in July 2021. Authorities should be able to afford some increase to their top-up funding for PRUs and other schools, where that is required to meet the cost increases they are facing.

Funding for PRUs comes from mainstream schools’ budgets, for those pupils placed by those schools, as well as from local authorities. There is no distinction in the national funding system between those pupils in PRUs who have special needs, and those who are there for other reasons.

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