Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what funding will be available to local authorities to (a) monitor the performance of its maintained schools, (b) support school improvement activities and (c) intervene in under-performing schools as appropriate after the School Improvement Monitoring and Brokering Grant has ended.

As per the recently published government response to our consultation on reforming how local authority school improvement functions are funded, in financial year 2023-24, the school improvement monitoring and brokering grant will cease. To allow core school improvement activity to continue, we are allowing local authorities, if they wish, to de-delegate funding from maintained school budgets instead. This will create greater parity between how school improvement is funded in the maintained sector and academies, who already fund this activity from their school budgets.

On average, this grant represented the equivalent of 0.3% of maintained school budgets in financial year 2021-22. By way of context, mainstream school budgets will see an average 5.8% year-on-year per pupil cash increase in 2022-23 in England, taking dedicated schools grant allocations together with the schools supplementary grant announced in December 2021.