Agenda item

To receive a report considering whether schools undertaking the academy conversion process should be required to reimburse to the council relevant costs which can be funded from the £25,000 grant the Department for Education (DfE) allocates to schools to meet their conversion costs.

The Forum considered a report to whether schools undertaking the academy conversion process should be required to reimburse to the Council relevant costs which could be funded from the £25,000 grant that the DfE allocated to schools to meet their conversion costs. Local authorities do not receive any grant funding to complete an intensive process that involves the legal, HR, property and finance functions.

Based on information gathered from relevant officers, it had been calculated that the average cost for the Council to undertake a Primary conversion was £8k and an estimate for a larger and generally more complex Secondary conversion was £10k. However this could vary, most often depending on the site and whether there were property issues involved.

A consultation had been undertaken with schools between 14 – 30 June 2017, with 15 (45%) making a response which in general supported the proposals to update the Scheme for Financing Schools to allow the council to directly charge schools converting to an academy..

As part of the consultation, a letter from Edgbarrow School had been received and this was included at Annex 1 of the report, together with a draft response.

As a results of the Members’ questions, the following points were made:

• Legal costs had been included as they are involved in the conversion process. In addition there were occasions when in-house provisions  do not have capacity to support the conversion process and in these cases legal advice would have to be purchased externally.
• An average cost of service approach to charging was the preferred option as the Council didn’t want to calculate costs and time recording for each individual conversion as this would be time consuming and impact on delivering services.
• Great Hollands conversion had probably cost twice the average cost amount due to complex property and legal issues.
• 45% response rate was considered good compared to other consultations.
• The wording in 5.11 was revised to: Costs incurred by the LA in completing the academy conversion process, at the average estimated amount, as reasonably assessed by the LA, subject to schools continuing to receive grant funding to assist the academy conversion process. In circumstances where costs are reasonably assessed to have exceeded the average cost by more than 50%, then the higher amount can be charged.
• The Council hadn’t made representations to the DfE in relation to the Council’s costs relating to the academy conversion process as it wasn’t the Council’s policy to comment back
• The Council was doing planning for possible conversions but work had been hindered due to Ofsted and the Council’s Transformation Programme.
• New build academies were the Local Authority’s responsibility to fund and would need relevant funding to pay for any cost of conversion charge levied..

RESOLVED that the Forum NOTE that in general, consultation responses from schools are supportive to the proposal from the council to recover from relevant schools reasonable costs associated with the academy conversion process.

RESOLVED that MAINTAINED SCHOOL MEMBERS on the Forum AGREE:

1. That relevant schools should be charged the average full cost to the council of undertaking the academy conversion process, currently estimated at £8,000 for primary schools and £10,000 for secondary schools.

2. That where costs on specific conversions are expected to exceed the average cost by 50%, then the full actual cost can be recovered.

3. That the Scheme for Financing Schools is updated accordingly, with the text in paragraph 5.11 subject to the amendment.