Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, if he will make it his policy to require local authorities to include colleges when distributing Government funding to help those educational settings tackle staffing needs.

Local authorities’ responsibilities, in respect of colleges and further education, are focused on securing appropriate provision for young people with particularly challenging special educational needs, through their high needs budgets.

Local authorities set their high needs budgets at the beginning of each financial year, and report on how much they propose to spend on different categories of provision. Having collected this information from each local authority, the department publishes local authorities’ budget statements, usually in September. As decisions on the placement of students with more complex needs are often not confirmed until after the beginning of the financial year, it is important that local authorities retain budget flexibility to respond to changing needs and demands during the year. It would therefore not be appropriate to advise local authorities to set aside and ring-fence a fixed amount of their high needs budget for further education, which could not be varied.

More generally, the department does not prescribe in detail how local authorities should allocate their high needs funding. Our guidance indicates that their spending decisions should be fair and reasonable and should enable them to discharge their duties under the Children and Families Act 2014 across the full 0-25 age range for which they are responsible. Nationally, local authorities will receive an increase of £1 billion in financial year 2022/23, bringing the overall high needs budget to a total of £9.1 billion. This increase takes account of the range of pressures on their high needs budgets, particularly those relating to a rise in the number of children and young people with education, health and care plans. As a result, local authorities should be able to afford some increase to the high needs funding they pass on to specialist and other colleges, where that is required to meet the cost pressures those colleges are facing, including the costs of meeting staffing needs.