Schools facing £90m black hole in budget

BRISTOL schools have been told to expect a £90 million black hole in their budget in four years’ time unless the council can turn the tide on rapidly haemorrhaging funds.

The local authority maintains 69 schools and received £403 million from the Government to run them in 2021/22.

But spending in Bristol continues to outstrip funding at an ever increasing pace, a problem it shares with many other councils around the country facing ballooning school budget deficits.

The hole in the budget for schools in Bristol is predicted to reach £89 million by 2025/26, school leaders heard this week.

But the council hopes it will be able to halve that figure with plans it has to manage the deficit and transform the way schools in the city educate children with special educational needs, members of the Bristol Schools Forum were told.

Abioye Asimolowo, an accountant for the council, said: “We believe that we can achieve some reduction in terms of that deficit forecast of roughly about £40 million, and that will bring down the deficit to about £45 million by 2025/26.”

The Government expects the council to submit its plan to “turn the [spending] curve” by the end of next year, after council finance director Denise Murray wrote to the Department of Education about what she called the “worrying” state of Bristol’s schools budget in September.

Much of the predicted deficit is due to spending to meet a growing demand for statutory services for children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND).

So the plan to reduce the deficit relies heavily on the success of the council’s three-year, £6.1million Education Transformation Programme, launched in March of last year, which includes work required by Ofsted and the Care Quality Commission to improve SEND services.

The programme made “good” progress last year, starting a project to create 190 extra special school places by September 2022 and continuing work to improve the statutory process around education, health and care plans (EHCPs) for SEND children, the schools forum heard in September.

In the next phase of the programme, the council plans to make funding available for schools to test ways to provide early support and intervention for children with SEND, with the overarching aim of eventually making all of the city’s schools more effective for children with special education needs, the forum heard this week.

Meanwhile, a growing number of children in Bristol are being identified as having SEND and the council is struggling to deal with a growing backlog of requests for EHCPs.

The latest figures from Open Data Bristol show 592 families were waiting for an EHCP as at October 1, of which more than half (324) had been waiting for longer than the statutory 20-week period.

Bristol’s newly appointed cabinet member for education, Labour councillor Asher Craig, pictured, said the Conservative government needed to properly fund services for children with special educational needs.

But Ms Murray said the council had to take responsibility for its local deficit and “drive forward” with its plan to reduce it.

“We recognise that there is a need for additional funding in the system but the legacy deficit is a local issue and we need to own that,” she said.