Cuts to Children's Services and Education Budget for Local Councils

Children’s services and education budget cuts for local councils

As part of the Chancellors’ recent announcement of £6.2bn cut in this financial year, £670m was cut from the budget of the Department for Education.

The Government’s plans

• According to Michael Gove’s letter to Ed Balls this week, £311m of this will come from the grants that the Department for Education gives to local councils to fund education and children’s services:

“We also have £1.3 billion that goes to local authorities in area based grant (ABG). This is a form of funding where the department makes specifics allocations to local authorities, but where local authorities have flexibility about how they spend it, for example where spending is discretionary, or where they can deliver statutory services more efficiently and cheaply they have freedom to deploy resources according to local decisions.”
“As part of the announced £1.165 billion cut in local government spending, the Department will this year reduce it’s area based grant to local authorities by £311 million.”
Michael Gove, Letter to Ed Balls, 7th June 2010

• Cuts totalling £311 million are equivalent to a 24 per cent cut across-the-board in every project and programme funded by these Area Based Grants. Thus far the government has not set out which of these grants will be cut, and in what proportion. If they do so, this campaign pack will be updated to reflect this.

The effect of these cuts

• In order to highlight the effect of these cuts, on frontline schools, on services for the most vulnerable children, we have indicated what sort of savings councils will need to find if a 24% cut is made from some of those budgets.

• Because they will need to be made 3 months into the financial year, these cuts effectively mean a reduction of almost a third in the budgets for these projects and programmes for the rest of the year.

• The table included in this briefing represents a breakdown for the 150 councils and boroughs around the country which currently receive more than £1 million of Area Based Grants from the Department for Education. The amounts that will be cut from some of the individual projects and programmes in that area are also shown. These do not add up to the total of the cuts in your area shown in the second column, because we have not included every project and programme in the breakdown.

• The full breakdown of the existing grants from which this £311 million will be cut can be found here:

http://www.communities.gov.uk/documents/localgovernment/xls/1536588.xls

The programmes affected

You may wish to use this table when highlighting in your local media the impact of the cuts in your area. Some of the individual projects and programmes funded by these Area Based Grants are currently delivering;

o The School Development Grant is used by Local Authorities to improve under-performing schools in their area. Similarly, the School Intervention Grant is used where Local Authorities have to intervene to turn around problem schools, or instal new leadership teams;

o The Extended Rights to Free Transport grants have been used by Local Authorities since 2007 to implement our decision to give free public transport to primary and secondary school pupils from low-income families where they live more than 2 miles away from the school;

o The Connexions Service helps young school-leavers to find apprenticeships or full-time work, and helps other young people to plan their careers;

o The Children's Fund supports projects to help tackle social exclusion by providing inclusive activities for disabled and disadvantaged children. Similarly, the grants for implementing the Care Matters White Paper fund projects to help troubled and abandoned children in care and foster homes turn their lives around;

o The Positive Activities for Young People fund helps pay for youth clubs, 5-a-side football pitches and other facilities to keep teenagers off the street. The grants related to Teenage Pregnancy and Substance Misuse fund local projects and campaigns to reduce rates of teenage pregnancy and abuse of drugs and alcohol.

o The grants for the Children's Social Care Workforce are used to fund local recruitment and training for social workers. The grants for Child Death Reviews are helping Local Authorities’ Children’s Services Units to pay for the additional costs of implementing the rigorous procedures we introduced for conducting such reviews.