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2020-21 Funding Allocations

On the 12th September the ESFA published Pre-16 schools funding: local authority guidance for 2020 to 2021.

The key points detailed below:

  • The minimum per-pupil levels will be set at £3,750 for primary schools and £5,000 for secondary schools. The primary level will rise to £4,000 in 2021 to 2022.
  • The funding floor will be set at 1.84%, in line with the forecast GDP deflator, to protect pupil-led per-pupil funding in real terms. This minimum increase 5 in 2020 to 2021 allocations will be based on the individual school’s NFF allocation in 2019 to 2020.
  • Schools that are attracting their core NFF allocations will benefit from an increase of 4% to the formula’s core factors. Exceptions to this are that the free school meals factor, will be increased at inflation as it is intended to broadly reflect actual costs, and premises funding will continue to be allocated at local authority level on the basis of actual spend in the 2019 to 2020 APT, with an RPIX increase for the PFI factor only.
  • There will be no NFF gains cap, so that all schools attract their full allocations under the formula. Local authorities will still be able to use a cap in their local formulae.
  • We will introduce a new formulaic approach to the mobility factor so that it allocates this funding fairly to all authorities, rather than on the basis of historic spend.
  • Growth funding will be based on the same methodology as last year, and will have the same transitional protection ensuring that no authority whose growth funding is unwinding will lose more than 0.5% of its 2019 to 2020 schools block allocation. There will be no capping or scaling of gains from the growth factor.
  • The teachers’ pay grant and teachers’ pension employer contributions grant will both continue to be paid separately from the NFF in 2020 to 2021. We will publish the rates that determine the 2020 to 2021 allocations in due course.

The ESFA will publish provisional NFF allocations at local authority level for the schools and high needs blocks in 2020 to 2021 in early October 2019, as well as notional school-level allocations.