Minutes:
Steve Muldoon gave a verbal update on national and local funding. The annual teachers’ pay award consultation would take place over the summer break, with the outcome to be confirmed in September. The DfE’s ambition to raise the starting pay for newly qualified teachers £30,000 per year by the end of the current Parliament is still in place – this means by December 2024. As yet it is unclear what progress there is on this proposal, which may be hindered by the potential knock-on issue of pay differentials.
Slough Borough Council is going through a finance restructure, announced recently by the section 151 officer. The scope of the restructure covers corporate financial management and so includes the children's finance team, and the accounts payable and receivable team. There is currently a consultation period with another three weeks to run. No redundancies are expected from this; the current team is quite heavily resourced by interim staff, so none of the permanent staff are at risk. There could be some movement between teams, with opportunities for rotation or promotion. Once this process has run its course there will be a recruitment process to backfill some of the vacancies from early autumn.
Steve Muldoon explained aspects of the Council’s budget process for 2023-24. Savings totalling around £16 million have been proposed and the relevant departments are preparing action plans, business cases and equality impact assessments. The robustness of those proposals across different areas of the Council will be reviewed together along the potential impact. This is in preparation for scrutiny committee meetings in October, prior to savings proposals being put to the Cabinet for approval.
In late December/ January period the council will find out what the local government funding settlement is going to be and whether there are any differences to the assumptions built into the budgets; after some refining, the full budget will go to Cabinet and Council in February/March.
The Chair thanked Steve Muldoon for the transparency about some of the issues and welcomed the greater stability within the finance team given the turbulence in recent years.
The Chair reminded Forum members that, over the course of the last few years the local formula had moved progressively closer to the national funding formula rates; in 2022-23 Slough schools are operating with a budget effectively based on the national funding formula. The current system is an indirect national funding formula, whereby the DSG Schools Block settlement is based on the national funding formula rates, but local authorities then allocate this funding to school budgets based on the local formula agreed with the schools forum.
The Government has now launched a consultation on implementing a direct national funding formula; this means that individual school budgets would be set centrally and nationally without the application of any local formula. This is an important consultation which covers quite significant proposals, including flexibility around transferring funding to the high needs block, the role of indicative SEND budgets, growth and falling roles funding and premises funding.
The Chair stressed the importance of responding to the consultation, which closes on 9th September. LA officers agreed that the Forum response should be separate from that of the LA. It was agreed that Forum members who wished to should send comments to the Chair who would collate a response at the beginning of the autumn term for submission by the deadline.