There are 73 zones, each of which receives 500,000/year for three years.
State school funding
There used to be four kinds of state school wholly or mainly supported from public funds:
。Country schools, owned and wholly funded by local education authorities and providing primary and secondary non-denominational education.
。Voluntary schools mostly established by religious denominations but financially maintained by the local education authority. Those which assumed greater financial independence and more control over admissions policies were known as ‘voluntary aided’ as opposed to ‘voluntary controlled’ schools, where the local education authority bore all costs.
。Special agreement schools where the local education authority might pay between one-half and three-quarters of the cost of building a new voluntary school or extending an existing one, almost always a secondary school.
。Self-governing grant-maintained (GM) schools which had opted out of local authority control
Under the former Conservative government, all secondary and primary schools were eligible to apply for grant-maintained status, subject to a ballot of parents.
These GM schools enjoyed a greater degree of independence over their admission policies. They were not financed by local education authorities but by a central funding agency.
Overview of the funding system
- the local government finance green paper (September 2000) proposed that in the new system overall education funding should be divided into two blocks: one for schools and one for LEAs. This would be the best way of matching funding to the separate responsibilities of schools and LEAs. The blocks would then be distributed via separate distribution formulae for schools and LEAs.
- The new system follows this. Within the schools block there are 4 main sub-blocks covering under 5s, primary, secondary and high-cost pupils. Within the LEA block there are two sub-blocks: one for Youth and Community provision and one for LEA central functions. Each sub-block has its own distribution formula. There are two further notional blocks a schools damping block and an LEA damping block.
- The schools block covers expenditure on direct educational provision for pupils, whether in an LEA’s schools or elsewhere. This means that there will be parts of the Schools block which will not be spent by maintained schools.
There are two types of state schools, which are organized differently:
- The schools under control of local authorities, and run according to their policies and ethos.
- The schools under the control of their governors, and run on a more individual basis.
All Saints Primary school is known as ‘faith’ schools, are given funds by churches, including (most frequently) the Church of England.
