Meeting documents

i) Mr Zahir Mohammed, Cabinet Member for Education and Skills.

ll) Lin Hazell, Cabinet Member for Children’s Services.

The Chairman welcomed:

• Mr Z Mohammed, Cabinet Member for Education and Skills.
• Lin Hazell, Cabinet Member for Children’s Services.
• Mr D Johnston, Managing Director for Children’s Social Care and Learning.
• Ms C Douch, Service Director, Children’s Services.

The Cabinet Member for Education and Skills updated the Committee on the following:

• The national funding formula (second phase of the consultation) had been received on 14 December 2016. An additional £10m would be made available to Buckinghamshire schools if the changes were implemented.
• 85% of schools in Buckinghamshire would gain from this additional money, but 15% would lose out.
• Nationally, 46% of schools would lose funding and 54% would gain.

There were a number of questions raised by Committee Members in relation to the funding formula and the following points were made in response:

·         The additional £10m would mean that teacher numbers would increase

• Over the last two years there had been approximately an additional £18m per year made available which had supported more teachers.
• The 15% of schools that were losing out were mainly primary schools with small pupil numbers and the amounts were relatively small. There would be mitigation in the first year with a cap of 1.5% on losses.
• The Government took into account a number of factors, for example free school meals and deprivation in the new formula.
• Secondary schools had already had discussions with the Council to look at the level of reserves available to help mitigate any loses to funding and to look at what other Local Authorities were doing.
• The Council met with the primary schools through a Primary Executive Board as well as Schools Forum.

·         Members agreed that the item would need to come back to the Committee for a fuller discussion at a future meeting.

ACTION: Governance Advisor.

The Cabinet Member for Children’s Services updated the Committee on the following:

• The Children’s Services improvement journey was continuing and so far there had been a positive response from the press.
• There was now a focus on the reconfiguration of the service, known as ‘Change for Children’ which included four separate work-streams.
• There was a focus on integrating disability and special educational needs services.
• The priority was always to maintain a strong service for children during both the improvement journey and the reconfiguring of services. The Committee would be kept updated with progress.

The following points were made during the discussion:

• The Munro system was not being completely disbanded but there would be a reduction in the number of teams to ensure that there was enough resilience.
• The improvements had not happened as quickly as the service would have liked; however; there had been a lot of hard work already undertaken to ensure changes were sustainable in the longer term.
• Buckinghamshire was looking at providing residential accommodation situated within the county as a way of reducing the number of out of county placements.  A business case was currently being worked up for this.
• The improvement plan work was focused on ensuring the best outcomes for children; the transformation process was to prepare the service for the future.