Agenda item

Jane Seymour introduced the report, which sought agreement from the Schools’ Forum to amend the funding bands for resourced units for children with physical disabilities.

Jane Seymour reported that there were currently three funding bands for children with physical disabilities (PD) and PD resourced schools and these bands were no longer fit for purpose. It was becoming increasingly necessary to provide ‘exceptional’ funding to PD resourced provision as PD3 was not sufficient to meet the staffing needs of the most complex children.  It was therefore proposed that the current Band PD1 was abolished and the value of the current Band PD2 was adopted as base funding for PD Resources. It was also proposed that a new band PD4 was introduced in order to reduce the number of cases where exceptional funding had to be applied.

Jane Seymour reported that the cost implications of the proposal were neutral as children were already being funded at higher levels than the existing funding bands through exceptional funding arrangements.

Reverend Mark Bennet asked if any work had taken place to track the number of children that had been kept out of a higher cost provision and whether this was a useful area of work for the Forum to consider. Reverend Bennet also noted that children with greater needs were being accepted into resourced provision and queried if there was scope to expand this further to prevent children having to enter higher level more expensive provision. Reverend Bennet stated that he would abstain from voting on the recommendation as he believed he had a conflicted interest. Jane Seymour reported that they could look at which children might have needed to move to a higher more specialist level of provision if resourced schools had not agreed to accept them. Regarding whether this could be expanded Jane Seymour reported that a whole range of issues would need to be looked at such as physical accommodation. Jane Seymour did not feel that there would be any scope to expand this area in the short term but was something that could be investigated further in consultation with the relevant headteachers.  Jane Seymour confirmed that PD was not a group that produced high numbers of pupils like Autism and SEMH and therefore did not have the potential to deliver the same level of savings.

Jonathon Chishick queried if there was any data available to show how funding levels compared with other local authorities and if there were any national standards. Jane Seymour confirmed that there were no national standards for PD. Other local authorities with similar provision had been approached in the past for benchmarking data however, it had been difficult to obtain this as local authorities did not have to provide this data as part of a national return requirement by the DfE. The only way to obtain the data was through cooperation from other local authorities and this had not been successful in the past however, could be revisited.

The Chairman invited the Forum to consider the recommendation to approve that the funding bands for PD resourced units should be amended as set out in the report for 2021-22. Jonathon Chishick proposed that the recommendation should be approved and this was seconded by Catie Colston. At the vote the motion was carried.

RESOLVED that:

• Jane Seymour to look at data on which children might have needed to move to a higher more specialist level of provision if resourced schools had not agreed to accept them.
• Jane Seymour to look into the possibility of expanding the use of resourced provision for children with high level PD with the relevant headteachers, to avoid the use of higher level more expensive provision.
• Jane Seymour to look into approaching other local authorities to obtain benchmarking data regarding funding levels for PD.
• The recommendation set out in 2.1 of the report proposing that funding bands for PD resourced units should be amended as set out in the report, was approved by the Forum.