General description

Under section 52 of the Schools Standards and Framework Act 1998, Local Authorities are required to provide a budget statement before the beginning of each financial year. The purpose of the statement is to provide information on the LA's education planned spending.

The data contained in the reports are derived from part 1 of the Section 52 Education Budget Statements completed by local authorities.

It is important that schools and others can compare funding so as to inform debate about budget levels and such issues as the balance of funding between primary and secondary schools.

The data shown in this report is purely delegated or devolved budgets to schools at the beginning of the financial year and does not include any money held centrally by the local authority and spent on behalf of schools.

Nursery schools only became part of delegated budgets from 2006/07 onwards so are not shown as part of this data for earlier years.

Standard budget reporting arrangements seek to address the problems of consistency in collecting data for the whole of Wales. Local authorities are demographically, physically, socially and economically diverse and also have very different operational structures and practices.


Number of pupils

This shows the pupil numbers in each school or number of places in the case of special schools.

For nursery, primary and secondary schools, this is be the number of full time equivalent pupils registered at the school, as used to determine each school's budget via the authority's relevant school funding formula.

In the case of a school open for part of the year, the figure is scaled down to reflect the length of time for which the school is open. For example, for a school open for 7 months of the financial year, the pupil numbers are scaled down by a factor of 7/12. The census date for collection of these numbers for the purpose of the Section 52 statements is January each year.

These figures will differ from those collected from schools via the Pupil Level Annual School Census (PLASC). PLASC collects the number of pupils registered at the school on a given day in January each year, from all nursery, primary, secondary and special schools maintained by the local authority.


Individual schools budget

This shows the budget determined for each school budget via the authority's relevant school funding formula. Regulation 14 of The Schools Budget Shares (Wales) Regulations 2004 states that budget shares must include grant paid by the Welsh Government under s.36 of the Learning and Skills Act 2000.

In the case of a school open for part of the year, the figure is the actual budget determined for the school.


Individual schools budget per pupil (£)

This is derived from the Individual School Budget divided by the number of pupils, giving the amount of funding provided per pupil in each nursery, primary and secondary school. For special schools, this will be the amount of funding per place.


Notional SEN budget

This is used to record the amount within each nursery, primary and secondary school's budget determined with reference to the estimated need to make Special Educational Needs (SEN) provision. This figure is set to zero for special schools as it is assumed that all provision for such schools is SEN.


Non-ISB funds devolved to schools

This is used to record any additional funding allocated to individual schools (i.e. where the schools control how the funding is spent, regardless of how the funding is accounted for) and where the amounts are not included in the formula budget recorded in the Individual Schools Budget. This includes allocations of Better Schools Funding to each school.

Data collection and calculation

The information presented here is collected via annual returns from Welsh Local Authorities.

Frequency of publication

Annual

Data reference periods

Data are shown for each financial year from 2002-03 onwards.

Title

Delegated schools budgeted expenditure

Last update

July 2024 July 2024

Next update

July 2025

Publishing organisation

Welsh Government

Source 1

Section 52 budget (S52B) data collection, Welsh Government

Contact email

stats.finance@gov.wales

Designation

National Statistics

Lowest level of geographical disaggregation

Local authorities

Geographical coverage

Local authorities

Languages covered

English and Welsh

Data licensing

You may use and re-use this data free of charge in any format or medium, under the terms of the Open Government License - see http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence

Keywords

Local Government Finance, delegated school budget per pupil

Weblinks

The associated statistical releases can be found via the links at the following webpage:
https://gov.wales/statistics-and-research?lang=en
A statistical quality report relating to all Local Government Finance statistical releases can be found at the following webpage:
https://gov.wales/local-government-finance-statistics-quality-report

Statistical quality

See weblinks

Name

LGFS0032

Dataset

OData (JSON) https://statswales.gov.wales/Download/File?fileName=LGFS0032.zip

Metadata

OData (JSON) https://statswales.gov.wales/Download/File?fileName=LGFS0032.xml

Dimensions

OData (JSON) https://statswales.gov.wales/Download/File?fileName=LGFS0032_dimensions.csv

Items

OData (JSON) https://statswales.gov.wales/Download/File?fileName=LGFS0032_dimensionitems.csv