Opinion

The Schools Supplementary Grant is entrenching inequalities

Inclusion School finance Vulnerable children
We risk entrenching educational inequalities via flaws in the distribution of the vital Schools Supplementary Grant. This could have the biggest impact on our most vulnerable students, say Warren Carratt and Susan Douglas

From last month, the government began rolling out its Health and Social Care Levy and from September 2022 all new teachers will expect a starting salary of £30,000.

To help schools meet this financial demand, the government announced in December that it will provide all state schools with extra funding, in the form of the Schools Supplementary Grants (SSGs), designed to help ease this significant financial burden while simultaneously safeguarding other areas of schools’ budgets so that no part of a child or young person’s educational journey suffers (DfE, 2021).

Although well-intentioned, the SSG hasn’t provided the protections it heralded. While this grant is guaranteed for all mainstream schools, the same cannot be said for SEN and alternative provision (AP) schools. This is because SSG funding for these two types of provision has been passed to local authorities which have then been asked to decide on a mechanism for distribution.

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