Education Skills and Funding Agency (ESFA) published a guidance document
The Department for Education and the Education Skills and Funding Agency (ESFA) published a guidance document for local authorities entitled ‘Dedicated Schools Grant (DSG) Management Plan Template’.
The guidance provides a tool that has been designed and built by the ESFA to support local authorities to bring together key information to support and formulate their DSG financial planning and recovery.
The Management Plan is designed as a tool to help authorities align key improvement activity to help understanding financial recovery impact as well as to support and provide guidance on key areas of consideration.
At the Schools Forum meeting of 1st March 2022 the Local Authority presented the draft approach for using the ESFA Management Plan Template to support and guide the finance recovery plan.
The Plan includes data as well as contextual information around what is being done to support the financial recovery activity. This includes, but is not limited to:
- EHCP Data current and forecasting through to 2026/27
- Financial data current and forecast through to 2026/27
- Activity being undertaken to address/mitigate financial pressures
- Comparator information across neighbours and nationally
Apart from the data around finance and number of children with SEND it provides a framework to consider areas of work around:
- Local area and governance
- Improvement workstream activity
- Stakeholders and engagement
- Placements and commissioning
- Local authorities’ specific plans for improvements operationally
Further work has been undertaken to ensure that the ESFA Management Plan and wider SEND Improvement programme align their activities to ensure that improvement activities across the services are conscious of the impact on finance, as well as to make sure that the Local Authority has a full system approach to the ESFA Management Plan rather than purely a financial recovery approach.
The Management Plan will be used ongoing as a way to measure our progress and will be refreshed and updated as we progress further along the improvement journey and shared with the Dudley Schools Forum.