Funding fears as Covid costs schools £1m

THE coronavirus pandemic has so far cost maintained schools in Coventry £1 million, councillors have been told.

Since the outbreak, local authority-maintained schools have had additional costs of £450,000 and lost income of £580,000, a council meeting was told on Wednesday, July 29.

Those schools have been able to claim back £270,000 and while some government packages have also been announced to support schools, fears have been raised over if it will be enough to plug the gap.

“As part to the national funding formula we are losing funding,” said the council’s finance manager Rachael Sugars, adding the “true impact” of the pandemic will not be known until the end of the financial year.

She stated: “The majority of schools are on the funding floor which means they will see a two per cent increase in their per pupil funding next year but we already know their salary inflation will be higher than that.

“Our schools already have a challenge in Coventry in managing that. We continue to have that dialogue with the department [for education] to raise those issues and flag the additional costs that schools are facing.”

The government announced a £1 billion Covid ‘catch-up’ package to directly tackle the impact of lost teaching time over the summer in June.

That includes £650 million for state primary and secondary schools over the 2020/21 academic year, and a National Tutoring Programme worth £350m to provide tuition for the most disadvantaged young people over the 2020/21 academic year.

However, councillors raised fears there was an element of “double-counting” in the funding with suggestions some of the National Tutoring Programme will be subsidised from the £650m money - a stance the Department

for rejected.

Director of education Kirston Nelson said: “The key point is the surprising information that the £650m that is being distributed to schools for this could potentially have to subsidise the national tutoring programme in terms of access to the tutors. We

Education has hadn’t anticipated that and I don’t think schools will have.

“I couldn’t possibly comment if it is a duplication of resource, but we do have concerns.”

A government spokesman insisted the £350m is separate from the £650m and pointed to a recent Department for Education announcement that schools will benefit from a school funding settlement worth a total of £14.4 billion over three years - said to be the biggest increase in a decade.

Education secretary Gavin Williamson said: “Our £1 billion Covid catch-up fund comes on top of this £14.4 billion three-year school funding boost, meaning that this government is leaving no stone unturned in levelling up opportunities for every young person up and down the country.”

Elsewhere, government funding has helped provide 11,300 school-age disadvantaged children - 20 per cent of the school population - with free school meals during the coronavirus, while 1,200 laptops have been distributed to vulnerable children.