Special Educational Needs: Per Capita Costs
(asked on 1st October 2019) - View Source
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what the mean funding is per pupil for SEND provision in (a) Wallasey constituency, (b) Merseyside and (c) the North West in each of the last 10 years.
Funding for pupils with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) is drawn from the Dedicated Schools Grant (DSG).
Local authorities are required to provide sufficient funds, from the schools block of the DSG, to enable mainstream schools to meet the cost of additional support for pupils with SEND, up to the value of £6,000.
When the costs of additional support required for a pupil with SEND exceed £6,000, the local authority should also allocate additional top-up funding to cover the excess costs. This top-up funding, and funding for special schools comes from the local authority’s high needs block on the DSG.
In 2013, the schools and high needs blocks within the DSG were created. As the DSG includes other budgets such as the early years budget, the department is unable to provide comparable figures before the creation of the blocks within the DSG in 2013-14.
Schools and high needs funding allocations for 2013-14 to 2019-20 are as follows. The department does not hold funding information for SEND support at a constituency level, or for Merseyside. We do not use the level of children and young people with SEND to determine the rate of funding for an area. As funding for children and young people with SEND is drawn from both the schools and high needs blocks, and there is not a ringfenced amount within the schools block for children and young people with SEND, we are unable to give an average figure.
In Wirral:
Year | Schools funding amount | High needs funding amount |
2013-14 | £188.0 million | £32.3 million |
2014-15 | £187.5 million | £33.6 million |
2015-16 | £191.3 million | £34.0 million |
2016-17 | £192.7 million | £33.7 million |
2017-18 | £195.9 million | £35.1 million |
2018-19 | £198.7 million | £35.8 million* |
2019-20 | £202.9 million | £36.9 million* |
In the North West:
Year | Schools funding amount | High needs funding amount |
2013-14 | £4,174.5 million | £674.2 million |
2014-15 | £4,190.6 million | £709.1 million |
2015-16 | £4,339.6 million | £719.2 million |
2016-17 | £4,398.7 million | £726.1 million |
2017-18 | £4,513.8 million | £751.5 million |
2018-19 | £4,590.1 million | £787.1 million* |
2019-20 | £4,703.5 million | £810.3 million* |
* In December 2018, the department allocated an additional £250 million of high needs funding across 2018-19 and 2019-20, in recognition of funding pressures. This additional funding is included within the final totals displayed.
In 2020-21, we will provide more than £700 million in additional high needs funding, bringing the national high needs funding total to over £7 billion. Every local authority will receive a minimum increase of 8% per head of their population aged 2-18 years old. We will provide provisional allocations to local authorities in October.