Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, whether her Department plans to increase levels of support to help schools in rural constituencies meet the needs of pupils with learning disabilities.

The department recognises the essential role that small, rural schools play in their communities. The national funding formula (NFF) accounts for the particular challenges, including those of providing for pupils with special educational needs (SEN), faced by small schools in rural areas through the lump sum and sparsity factors. The NFF lump sum for the 2025/26 financial year is set at £145,100 and provides a fixed amount of funding that is unrelated to the number of pupils in a school. In addition, eligible small, rural primary schools attract up to £57,400, and eligible secondary or all-through schools attract up to £83,400, in sparsity funding in 2025/26 through the NFF.

Where the cost of additional support for a pupil with SEN exceeds £6,000 per annum, the local authority provides the school with extra funding from its high needs budget. The department is providing £1 billion more for high needs budgets in 2025/26, bringing total high needs funding to over £12 billion, to help local authorities and schools with the increasing costs of supporting their pupils with complex needs. Of that total, Dorset County Council is being allocated over £60 million through the high needs funding block of the dedicated schools grant (DSG), an increase of £4.1 million on the 2024/25 DSG high needs block, calculated using the high needs NFF.