Agenda and minutes

Apologies for absence were received from Andrew Downes, Patrick Foley, Neil Proudfoot, Karen Raven, and Aydin Önaç. The Vice-Chairman, David Bridger, took the Chair in the absence of the Chairman.

In relation to Minute 19, Alison Regester declared an interest as the owner of a private nursery in the Borough.

In relation to Minute 23, Neil Miller declared an interest as the PRU Head Teacher and Dr Martin Airey declared an interest as a Secondary Academy Head Teacher.

The minutes of the meeting held on 13 September 2016, were approved, and signed as a correct record.

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.

The Vice-Chairman reported that he had asked the Head of ECH Finance to present a paper to the next meeting on the proposed membership of the Schools’ Forum going into the future in light of recent school academy conversions.

All meetings are at Bromley College unless otherwise stated.

12 January 2017

The next meeting would be held on 12^th January 2017.  At this meeting the Forum would be considering budgets for the next financial year and the Vice-Chairman urged as many members as possible to attend the meeting.

The Chairman to move that the press and public be excluded during consideration of the items of business listed below as it is likely in view of the nature of the business to be transacted or the nature of the proceedings that it members of the Press and public were present there would be disclosure to them of exempt information.

RESOLVED: that the press and public be excluded during consideration of the items of business listed below as it is likely in view of the nature of the business to be transacted or the nature of the proceedings that it members of the Press and public were present there would be disclosure to them of exempt information.

The Part 2 (exempt) minutes of the meeting held on 30 June 2016 were agreed, and signed as a correct record.

Report ED17023

The Schools’ Forum consider the report and discussed potential savings in the High Needs Block.