Issue - meetings

Report ED17024

The Head of Schools’ Finance Support introduced the report explaining that in August 2016 the DfE had launched a consultation on the new Early Years National Funding Formula. In September the Schools Forum agreed the LAs response to the consultation. The final outcome of the consultation was yet to be published however, the Early Years working group had continued to meet to consider what changes may needed to the Bromley formula to meet the new guidelines.  As part of the consultation process, the DfE published indicative funding guidelines for 2017/18 which indicated that the funding for the Early Years Block for Bromley was likely to increase and all modelling was therefore undertaken on that basis. The current funding was based on an hourly rate of £4.19 which provided overall annual funding of £13,095,000.  Based on the projections this could increase to £4.91 per hour giving overall funding of £15,298,067.  This represented a significant increase for Bromley settings.

The Head of Schools’ Finance Support reported that the only supplements that were available for Local Authorities to use were (i) Deprivation which was mandatory; Rurality/sparsity which was optional; Flexibility which was optional; Efficiency which was optional; and Delivery of the additional 15 hours free childcare which was optional.

The Working Group .felt that the optional supplements either did not reflect Bromley’s demographics or that the supplements would be very difficult to measure and to administer  The proposal was therefore that Bromley would only use the mandatory deprivation supplement. The current formula also included supplements for quality (based on OFSTED judgements) and SEN (based on actual need of children in each setting).  Around 97% of settings received the quality supplement therefore if this funding was absorbed into the base rate there should be little impact on the majority of settings.  The SEN supplement was currently only paid to ten settings.  It was anticipated that these settings would lose funding overall under the new formula but that the impact would not be significant. However, there was no way of mitigating the impact if the supplement was no longer allowed.

Bromley currently used IDACI as the indicator for deprivation for Early Years funding (in the absence of any free school meal data). This appeared to be the measure of deprivation that was used by the majority of Local Authorities. However, settings also received Early Years Pupil Premium (EYPP) which was based on the individual earnings of parents, in the same way as free schools meals entitlement, and was perhaps a more accurate indication of circumstances. The Working Group therefore proposed that both measures of deprivation should be used to allocate funding to ensure that the additional funding was reaching the most deprived pupils.  The maximum amount that Local Authorities could distribute through the supplements was 10%. The Working Group discussed this at length at were of the opinion that 10% seemed very high if only one supplement was being used. The Group looked at three sets of modelling data with the  ...  view the full minutes text for item 19