Council banned from using £200,000 grant to repair schools

A London city council launched an urgent £200,000-a-year repair grant for its poorest schools – only to be ordered by government officials to withdraw the money.

Barnet council wanted to transfer money from its dedicated school grant reserves for “urgent, unbudgeted repairs” to the worst-off schools maintained by the authority.

However, the Education and Skills Funding Agency intervened to ban the initiative before it got underway, saying revenue costs could not be capitalized.

School buildings expert Tim Warneford said the case highlighted “the obvious gap between the capacity and resources of any school to adequately maintain its grounds”.

“There is not enough (capital) funding across the sector. They have to triage and prioritize emergency repairs as best they can, but demand is outstripping their budgets at every level,” he said.

Barnet said the money would only have been given to schools in deficit and for work deemed “essential”. It planned to offer £200,000 towards the work each year until 2027.

Almost a third of the 80 schools run by the Barnet authority were in deficit at the end of March 2023.

However, the ESFA received a complaint from a local manager regarding high needs allowances. This led government officials to “go through the minutes of recent school forum meetings” and discover the fund.

Minutes of the school forum, published earlier this year, suggested this was “not in line with updated School and Early Years Funding and Childcare Regulations 2024”, said the ESFA, adding: “As a result, the local authority has had to withdraw this fund. »

A council spokesperson said the authority was “looking at ways to find additional funding for schools experiencing budgetary difficulties and we have therefore looked at Dedicated School Grants (DSG) funding as a potential source”. But the ESFA “informed us that this was not possible”.

Schools will have to dig into their pockets

Barnet confirmed schools would now have to dip into their own pockets to pay for repairs.

Local authorities receive “conditional” funding directly from government each year.

Schools also directly receive a smaller sum, called devolved formula capital, which Warneford described as a “totally insufficient core maintenance fund”.

Last year, a National Audit Office report found that the government estimated it needed £5.3 billion in annual funding to “maintain schools and mitigate the most serious risks of building failure”.

The Department for Education asked the Treasury for £4 billion a year for the period 2021 to 2025, but it only received £3.1 billion. This amounted to a “significant gap”.

“Limited funding” has forced councils and academies to “prioritize elements of school buildings in the worst conditions, leaving less to spend on effectively maintaining other structures and improving or developing their estate”.

In a letter to the Public Accounts Committee last year, Hampshire council said it was managing “an estimated contingent liability of around £420 million”.

It argued that its state schools allocation “of £23 million is insufficient” to keep up with “the deterioration of its aging estate or to improve buildings to a standard appropriate for effective learning”.

This means that some of its buildings, which are already “more than 50 years old and have defects… will wait another 20 years to be improved”.

Warneford said Barnet’s case “suggests that (the DfE) has been quite rigid in terms of understanding the reality on the ground”, adding: “There is simply not enough money to deal with the rate of decay of our aging stock. »