Minutes:
It was the overall feeling that schools would find their budgets difficult to manage in the following year due to the impact of Covid-19.
A Headteacher member pointed out it was regrettable that, if a school had underspent due to careful financial management in order to finance development needs, they would not be able to claim for exceptional costs incurred due to Covid-19. A number of schools had worked hard to build a small reserve, invariably to spend on a necessity for instance a new curriculum model in line with DfE and Ofsted requirements. The impact of Covid-19 would be felt longer term on school budgets and costs would continue, particularly if there were a second spike.
It was suggested the Catch-Up funding would not be helpful until more information were made available to support schools in planning for the new year.
Annie Wood agreed to take these two points back to the ESFA.
It was not expected that such balances would be added to a school’s budget going forward but Susan Woodland agreed to investigate.
Update/confirmation since the meeting:
“Funding is available to schools that are unable to meet such additional costs from their existing resources, or which they could only meet by drawing down on reserves and undermining their long-term financial sustainability.
Schools are not eligible to make a claim against this fund if they expect to add to their existing historic surpluses in their current financial year (September 2019 to August 2020 for academies and April 2020 to March 2021 for maintained schools). This means schools cannot claim if they began their current financial year with an accumulated historic surplus and expect to increase that surplus this year and thereby finish the year with a higher level of reserves than they started.”
Schools Forum agreed to keep this issue under review.