20 October 2006
Up to £1bn sitting in schools' bank accounts could be made available for broader non-educational children's services, Education Secretary Alan Johnson has said.
Johnson, speaking at the National Children and Adult Services Conference in Brighton, was responding to local authorities' concerns that current school funding arrangements hampered efforts to provide integrated children's welfare and recreation services.
He said: 'There is certainly an issue around access and control of the dedicated schools grant. A lot of money is lying fallow and I hope we can address that in the process of the Comprehensive Spending Review.'
Social care and local government leaders welcomed Johnson's comment and said it was indicative that he was listening to concerns they had directly raised with him.
While it was unlikely he would abolish direct funding to schools – in place since the early 1990s – he would instead look to cap the size of savings accounts and broaden the range of criteria on which schools could spend their grants. Tapping into school reserves would also help the government out of what is set to be a tight Spending Review.
John Freeman, vice president of the Confederation of Children's Services Managers, said that although individually the school reserves were 'not huge', nationally at least £1bn was inactive in school bank accounts. 'That money was set aside for children's services and education, and anything we can do to enable schools to spend that money rather than have it sit in bank accounts is a good thing.'
Instead of spending their grants across the entire Every Child Matters agenda, schools were spending narrowly on school-based education and building up reserves 'for a rainy day', added Freeman, either to save for something like a new minibus or as a safeguard against future funding shortfalls.
He said that changes to the way the grant was regulated would not mean local authorities stopping schools from saving where it was warranted.
PFoct2006
