Transcript

Okay, so good, good, so we've got a couple of questions here. Okay, so, good, good, good afternoon everyone on this meter schools forum, the first, the first item of the agenda is to formally appoint a chair of this forum, as the vice chair has been chairing the last few meetings, so forum members, is there any nomination for the chairmanship? Members can also nominate themselves. I think Chris has been doing a good job if he's still keen to do it. Okay, so Isabelle proposed Chris, so does anyone second the second nomination? Yes, I would Lawrence. Okay, so any other nominations or is that nomination approved, you're not actually approved? Yeah, okay, so Chris is now, is now the chair of this forum and because of that the vice chair position has now become vacant, so does anyone have a nomination for the vice chairship? Anyone can, forum members can nominate themselves if they want this to indicate whether they're willing to do it or not? No, just the vice, just the chair's position filled? Okay, if that's the case then we'll postpone the vice, the vice chair position, nominating the vice chair position to a later meeting, so yeah, Chris, do you want to start continuing the meeting? Okay, so you're asking me to be chair? Yeah, well you've been nominated chair, so yeah. Thank you, all right, okay, right, okay, so moving on, so first of all welcome to this online meeting of schools forum on today's date, 27th of June, 2024. My name is Chris Tomes and I'll be chairing this meeting. This meeting is being held virtually via Zoom and streamed live to the public on YouTube. I remind all attendees that the participation of attendance of the meeting indicates consent to the audio, I'll wait for the aeroplane to go over, participate in the meeting indicates consent to the audio and video being streamed live and acknowledgement that after the meeting it will continue to be available in the public domain. It is important that all participants recognise that meeting remotely requires a different approach than meeting in person. Firstly, it'd be useful if our panel members would introduce themselves so the public are aware who is in this meeting and the role they are undertaking. I've introduced myself as Chris Tomes, chair of the schools forum. Looking around, Clive, do you want to go next? Sorry, Chris, trying to find mute. Clive Haynes, deputy director for education. Louise. Hi, Louise Dutton, head of finance. I'm here to present agenda items five and seven. Sarah. Sarah Ward, finance team at the North Shore. Helen. I think there's two Helens but I'll go three Helens. Oh, gosh, that's confusing. Hi, I'm Helen Marl. I'm also part of the finance team in Royal Borough of Windsor-Maidenhead. Isabelle. Isabelle Cook, I represent primary academies. And Helen Huntley. And consultant working within the RBWM leading on the DBV project this year. And Helen. Last Helen. Hi, Helen Hanam and I represent Manning Green special school. Catherine. Catherine Page, head teacher of Oldfield primary school representing maintained primary schools. Andrew. Hi, Andrew Morrison, head teacher at Fers Platt senior representing secondary academies. Ben. Hello, I'm Ben Wright, school based planning and capital programme manager at the Borough. And Kim. Hi, I'm Kim Mudley. I'm the new democratic services officer shadowing Lawrence this afternoon. Thank you. Lawrence has already introduced himself. So we go to Eddie. Any neighbourhood? Okay, so just moving on then. In terms that I request the meeting participants do not speak unless I specifically invite you to do so. For virtual participants, you can indicate your desire to speak by raising your hand in zoom. This is then shown against the participant list in order of request. I will keep to that order of speakers and there should be no jumping in. Once I have invited you to speak before you do so please state your name and the capacity in which you are speaking if that is appropriate. Once you have spoken on an item, please lower your hand using the same function. If you decide to withdraw your request to speak at any time, please also lower your hand. I will ask officers to speak at appropriate times. All participants should keep their microphone muted at all times other than when they've been invited to speak. Experience tells us that background noise can be very distracting and will adversely affect other speakers and the progress of the meeting. If any individual attempts to disrupt the meeting, I'm able to use my powers in the constitution to adjourn the meeting or have that individual removed from the meeting. I would ask or would also like to address that as long as you continue to hear the debate, you may take the opportunity to move away from your screen, stretch your legs if you need a break. To ensure both participants in the zoom meeting and watching via YouTube can follow the business, please ask everyone to use page numbers and paragraph numbers when referring to any other item in the report. We will now start on agenda items. Do we have any apologies for absence? Yes, Chas, apologies you see from Neil Dimble, Neil Dimble D from Altwood and Sarah Cottle from Mainhead Nursery Federation. Thank you, thank you for that. So moving on to the next item, any decorations? Sorry, sorry, sorry, one more, sorry, I've got one more apology, Ben Bals from PVI, sorry. Okay, okay, moving on to the next item, decorations of interest. Is there any decorations of interest related to the agenda items today? No? Okay, let's move on to item number four, minutes of the previous meeting. We just want to confirm the minutes from the previous meeting. Everyone happy with the minutes from the previous meeting? Take that as read. So we'll move on. Is there any matters arising from the previous meeting that are not already included in the agenda? So let's move on to item number five, dedicated school grant update. So the form is to consider the report from Louise from A Team for Children. So Louise, can I hand over to you to talk through this item? Thanks, Chris. Yeah, I'm here to present agenda item number five, which starts on page five of the reports pack. There are four recommendations that I will take you through as I go through the report. The first one is just to update schools forum on the out term position for the financial year 23/24. The next item is to update the forum on the budget setting for the financial year 24/25. The next item will be an update on the de-delegated services, both the out term position for 23/24 and the final allocations for 24/25. And then the final item which will require schools forum approval is around the growth fund support for bulge classes protection for the financial year 24/25. So the first item on the report is in section four of the report pack, which is page 11. And that just details the out term position for the financial year 23/24. I won't go through every single item, but just the overall kind of position was we had a DSG allocation last year for 23/24 of 150 million.476 and with a net budget of 74.916 million and the out term spend on that 74 million was 74.910 million. So that gave an under spend of 5,900 pounds. So that has gone into offset the deficit balance that has been carried forward from year on year and the deficit balance is detailed in section 4.5 of the report. And so carrying over from 22/23, we had a deficit balance of 1.106 million. That's now reduced to 1.1 million pounds. And then on table four, page 13 of the report just shows the detail of the school balances. So that is separate to the main DSG reserve. So schools have their own ring fence budget and that gets held in its own reserve. So this table just, oh no, sorry, the table in section, sorry, bear with me. I've just lost table. Yeah, table four, sorry, on page 13 is the school's balances. And you can see there in the end of 23, 22/23, we had a balance of 2.547 million pound. That increased very slightly by up to 2.894 million. So there was an increase of 347,000. What we have done this year, we've actually put appendees to this report. So appendees B and C gave a breakdown of all the school's balances. So we've, appendix B shows the maintained school balances and appendix C shows the academy balances. I just want to highlight the academy balances we took from the DfE's benchmarking data. So it's not our own data. It's direct from the DfE's benchmarking data. So that item is just for the school's form just to acknowledge the position at the end of the financial year. Moving on to the next section, it's the settlement for the 24/25 financial year. That's detailed in section six on page 13 and 14. And just highlight of that, we had a settlement this year of 165.364 million pounds. That's an increase of 9.437 million pounds from last financial year. A huge amount of that money is actually sitting in the early years block. And the main reason for that is the introduction of the new provision for the two-year-olds and the nine-month-old's provision. So the actual settlement itself wasn't a great settlement. It looks better because of the early years, the new offer in that area. Moving on to the next section is de-delegation. That can be found in section seven, page 14 and 15. So the first part is the 23/24 out-term position. There was an underspend of 115,000 across all the de-delegated budgets. What we have done, we've moved that into a near mark reserve. And we've proposed that that stays in there until we know the out-term position for 24/25. And then when we know what that position is, we can be in a position to distribute that back to schools or retain it here at the borough and carry it into future years. Table seven on the same page, page 15, just gives a breakdown of what the rates and the total funding has been confirmed for the 24/25. I think at the last forum, schools forum, agreed to these areas, but it was provisional rates at that point, so now we've run the budget. These are now confirmed rates and actual budgets for those. Moving on to the final section, that's section eight of the report. We're bringing this item back. It was agreed in the November's forum, an element of protection for schools that take bulge classes. And the agreement was that schools or the bulge funding would protect schools for one year. And the reason we're bringing this back, there's two reasons. One, at the meeting in November, as officers, we felt the conversations leading up to the decision were actually different to what the decision was. And also feeding back to schools who may be taking bulge classes has actually asked us to come back to forum to ask them to reconsider the protection funding. So at the moment we've got three options and they're detailed on table eight, page 16. So they're the options that we propose as an LA. We're happy for schools forum to have a conversation and either agree to one of those options or if they wish to come up with some options themselves. So if I pause there and I'll open it up to the forum for discussion or any questions. Okay. Are there any comments about that bulge class protection that has been presented? When I asked the question around the decision to come back, you said it, was it because the decision we made wasn't, they want us to come back and reconsider or was it not, there wasn't a clarity on that decision? I think the schools have asked us for you to reconsider. We're also asking for clarity because the conversations in the forum when we played back the meeting indicated the forum wanted to go with option B, but the actual decision was to go with option C. So we just want clarity really and to reconsider from the schools point. Okay. So as a forum we decided option B was the option, the preferred option that came forward, but somehow that got miscommunicated into option C. Yeah, the conversations leading assumed option B, but it was actually quite clear that the final agreement was option C. But we weren't sure whether there's a bit of confusion around what the actual agreement was. Anyone on the forum that wishes to make comment about the option B or C going forward? Louise, can you remind us of what the two options were? Yeah. So option A, so option A wasn't spoken about much or agreed. Option A gave a phased four year protection starting at 85% going down to 20% in year four, like on the fourth year. And then option B was a three year protection starting at 90% phasing down to 40% protection. And then option C was only a one year protection of at 95%. So that's 95% of where they're missing children up to their capacity of 30 years. I'm one of the people who spoke at the last one because what we said is whilst they're creating bulge classes in the middle of Maidenhead, there are lots of schools, the three schools I'm representing, are not full to capacity. And we're providing so that we're preventing those schools getting income because we're creating extra places internally or in the middle of Maidenhead. I understand from the local authority, because they would be over the traveling distance for primary schools, they would then have to fund transport. So I do understand the difficulty the local authorities and for schools that are outlining schools, rural to Maidenhead central, protecting this for a long time, impacts heavily on the school, you know, on the outlying schools. Is there no ways we can sort of come to because we go from one year, three years to four years? Is there no way we could come to like a two year? So at least it's given them because if they've built up the numbers, they get their funding on the census from October. So they could have increased significantly by October, after two years. Yeah, we can you as a forum, you're able to come up with your own ideas, your own phasing, if you wish to. So, so just to clarify, so the bulge class would come in, the funding would go through to them to get them through to the point where the census then will kick in to then provide that money, which is probably why option C was the one that we agreed to. But however, you're asking us to reconsider for clarity or reconsider because that wasn't necessarily an accepted position. A bit of both really, around clarity, as I said, because the discussions leading up to the decision indicated the preferred option was B, and likewise schools that are potentially needing to take or want or we want to take bulge classes as vast, if it can be reconsidered. And we're hearing that that within there are places within schools that have spaces at the moment that could could be used. Ben might want to come in on this one. Yeah. Sorry, Ben, you've got your hand up. So apologies. Yeah. Ben, do you want to take? I'm happy to come in. I just noticed Catherine had her hand up first, so if you like it. OK, thank you. Catherine, apologies. No, that's OK, Chris. And actually, maybe Ben will comment on this. But I was just, to build on what Isabel said, I'm aware that other, I'm central in Maidenhead and I'm just aware that there are other Maidenhead primary schools that are not full. So I'm just a bit intrigued around the numbers in terms of how many bulge classes there are. So in terms of how many schools this is impacting. But Ben can probably answer that. Over to Ben. OK, thank you. So what we've done is at the last forum, the members considered a change to the formula which allowed us to be generous to schools and add in a couple of places worth of funding. And that was what was aimed at Maidenhead schools because at the present we're short at places in years four, five and six. And we know that schools don't want to take bulge classes halfway through the school for year four, five or six because they won't fill. But what we still need is some mechanism of finding actual places for those junior age groups in Maidenhead. So that's been agreed. This is about the bulge classes and this is actually primarily aimed at Dutchett at the moment. And we've been talking about a bulge class starting at reception, not going up into one of the other year groups halfway through the school. And this is because there's a bulge in demand coming through in Dutchett. Now, of course, we may well need bulge classes going forward in other parts of the borough, but at the moment, I'm not looking at any reception bulge classes anywhere other than Dutchett. Clearly, the decision the forum takes would set a precedent for future bulge classes, but just to reassure Maidenhead primary that we're not looking at additional places via a bulge class. We do, of course, still have a plan to bring the Chiltern Road site back into use as a primary school as and when demand from all the new housing in the centre of Maidenhead starts to generate pupils. But that's not going to be before September twenty twenty six at the earliest. So the bulge class really is for the moment just about Dutchett, not Maidenhead. Is there some sort of caveat that could say that, you know, in terms of of the bulge funding where there is where they're trying to say something along the lines where there is that is an alternative provision locally available in terms of that. I'm not sure if I communicated that quite right, Isabelle. So I agree with what Chris is saying. So Dutchett is a very different scenario. There aren't other primary schools nearby where in Maidenhead, as was pointed out by myself and Catherine, there are schools that aren't empty. So that's a particular situation in the borough. But they're actually also an outlying area of the borough. So can we say that it's done school by school, that we consider if there are places locally, because if you're looking at four, five and six, that the transport is not going to be many years that the borough will be funding. But if we agreeing for four or three years funding, we funding for a long time for places that are available, we double funding. Well, we're not double funding because those other schools aren't getting the funding and recreating extra places. Okay, so what I'm picking up is that, that we go forward with a recommendation of picking up that the recommendation is B and that this will be case by case approach. Is that right, Ben? Do you want to come back in there? You had your hand up. Yes, yes, sorry. Thank you. Yes, so certainly the feedback we've had on the bold class is that the current arrangements are not generous and that schools will not take a bold class unless something along the lines of B is adopted. That's the feedback I've had from schools. In terms of a case by case basis, I guess what we could do is come back to the form if we feel there are more bold classes coming forward in the future. But as I said at the moment, I'm only looking at that chat. Okay, so we can review this year by year when we know what placements are looking like. Yeah, okay. Is everyone happy to move forward then? So the proposal is option B and it is for the case that's been presented this year and we'll make sure that this is presented each year going forward if there are future bold classes coming through to be considered. Are you happy with that as an outcome? Yeah, okay. Right, let's move, can I hand back to Louise then to move forward? That's it from me, so yeah, I'm happy that I've covered everything in that agenda item now. Thank you, thank you. Okay, so moving on to the next item, which I'll go back to the agenda. So delivering better value, okay, and is that from Clive? It's actually Helen Hunter who will be speaking on this part. Okay, thanks Chris. Is it possible for Lawrence to put the PowerPoint presentation up, please, for everybody to look at? Sure, thanks, just give me a second. So just while Lawrence is doing that, my understanding from Clive is that there's no decision to be made about this, it's really a report just about an update on that. Is that what it is, Louise? I'm seeing Louise nod. Yeah, that's correct. It's just an update for the forum. Okay, so there are nine slides, but I'm going to go through it fairly quickly. So if we could have the second, the second and the third slide are really just giving you the context to this. So delivering better values is a DFE initiative, and we have been invited to be a part of that. The second slide, please, Lawrence, if that's possible. We've been asked to be a part of that because of our overspend on our high needs block. And what happened with the second tranche to go through the delivering better values, our overspend wasn't significant enough to warrant the safety valve programme. So during last year, there was a huge auditing process. And I think a special thanks to Louise and her team, and David Griffiths and his team, who spent an extraordinary amount of time putting this detail together. And as a result of that, we were able to apply for a DBV grant of a million pounds. And I'm delighted to say that we were successful in our application. Next slide, please. So as a result of the scrutiny, I'm not going to go through that in any great detail, we have three areas of focus, ordinary available provision in schools, which is really the support that's in place in schools for children who do not have a plan. So it's universal support, really. We were also, as a part of that, asked to look at some of the decisions we've made about placement of children with plans and funding. And then there was a post 16 focus as a second strand. Next slide, please. So we've been looking at this. This slide is all about the ordinary available provision in schools. We have employed a company called Whole Education Send. And so far, 17 schools have been involved in this very simple process of self-evaluation of their ordinary available provision, and then action planning, with support from a range of people that you can see on this slide there. As well as this process, which has gone very well, we had a review of this yesterday. We've also been working with our Send Voices, our parent carer forum, about the creation of resources, such as the creation of resources made by families for families such as new to send, or demystifying send terminology. So that's the ordinary available provision. Next slide, please. In addition to this, we've been doing some deep dives into our decision making, and that has involved looking at the children with permanent exclusions who have been, sorry, children with plans who have been permanently excluded, and also the requests are being made for children who have what's referred to as an ERSAA profile, Emotionally Related School Avoidance. And we've, as a result of these deep dives, looking at a lot of data, we have come up with action plans, and the DBV funding will be used at implementing these action plans. And we recently had a very successful conference with all the, well, many of the head teachers of schools in RBWM, how we can mitigate the risk of another child with a plan being permanently excluded. And next term, we'll be looking at all placements in independent non-maintained special schools, which are fee paying schools, which eat into our high needs block funding. Next slide, please. We've also been looking at our post 16 provision, ordinary available provision, because any out of borough placement for somebody post 16 tends to be very expensive as well. And so we've been looking at that, and there's just an example of some of the things we have been doing as a result of this. And we have been building some great relationships with our four colleges, local colleges, which are part of the Windsor Forest College Group, that's BCA in Maidenhead, Langley in Slough, as well as Windsor and Strode as well. So we've put on various events for professionals, families, event is tomorrow. And in October, we are having a PFA preparation for adulthood event for all young people in the borough with plans. We've also been aligning this work with another grant that we received after a successful bid by David Griffiths for the NDTI. Please don't ask me, I can't remember what it stands for National Government. Anyhow. Next slide, please. Just something about so what we've done all along, we have been ensuring that this 1 million pounds is being spent to build capacity across our educational establishments. So that after we've spent this money, everybody has benefited particularly, obviously, our young people with SEND have benefited from the money that we have spent. And I think the next slide, please, Lawrence, shows how we've there's just a few cogs. So if you could just press the three more cogs to come through. So we've been looking at how these things fit together. Looking from our early providers through to our post 16 providers as well. We've also been doing a little bit of work on recognising that schools are saying we have an increasing cohort of young people who are not what we are referring to is school ready, or ready for school and ready to learn. And that's not just young people in reception, but it could be a year nine pupil, a 14 year old, who for a range of reasons is not in the best place to learn. So that just demonstrates how we're working across all these areas to improve the lives of children with SEND in our borough. And the final slide just very briefly touches on some of the things that I've already said. And these are some things which we have agreed will embed the sustainability, which is looking at the school readiness, and also reflecting that so much of the work in the early year setting impacts on how those young people succeed throughout their school experience. So I hope that that's sufficient. I'm here to answer any questions. Helen, Em and Clive and Katie and I met just before this meeting. And we have planned out that coming 12 months and it's all going to be in budget. So that's good news. Thank you. Any questions relating to this agenda item? Hello, thank you for presenting that to governance to forum members today. We're going to move on to the next item, which is scheme for financing schools I believe. The forum to consider the update from... Sorry, Clive's got his hand up. Sorry, I was trying to find the hand up button before you moved on. I just wanted forum members to sign page 32 of that report that Helen just went through the slides. And that is the financial, the current financial position of the DBV spend currently. As Helen said, we're on budget and the money will be spent in time. But forum need to know the journey of that spend. So I just wanted to make that table aware to forum members. Okay, thank you. So it's page 32. You can see it all documented there. Okay, so moving back again, we go back onto the scheme for financing schools and I'm handing over to Louise again. Thanks Chris. So yeah, the scheme for financing schools only affects maintained schools. Just a bit of background, the DfE produce a national scheme for financing schools and then from that we write our local one and annually the DfE update their scheme and so we update, we have to update ours if there's a directive notification for us to do that. And in this year's scheme there's been one directive from the DfE and that's on the supplementary information that's provided. It's on page two. It just gives a detail there of what that directive update was and it reads section 5.8 borrowing for schools first paragraph the introduction of IFRS 16 for local authorities from the 1st of April 2024 ends the distinction between operating and finance leases at maintained schools and in effect all leases will be classified as finance leases for accounting purposes. Just to draw your attention, it's not actually in section 5.8, it is in section 3.6 on page 21. So I'll get that scheme updated with that detail there. What does that actually mean for us? To be honest it doesn't really mean anything because at the moment schools have very few amount of finance leases and it's just combining the two of them. At the moment you'd report whether it's an operating or finance one where now you only have to report just the one set of reporting. There's no real impact to schools on that. Okay thank you for that. Any questions on that? Is there anything else you need to bring to our attention? No just that one update and then that will be published and shared with all schools. Okay any further questions on that? No? Right we're moving on to the next agenda item which is training session for forum members. So it's I suppose this is around just scheduling an opportunity for training in terms of becoming a forum member. I was at a BASH meeting, a secondary heads meeting this morning. We did appeal for head teachers from academies coming forward because our representation from there is not as many as we would like going forward. I just think in there is there someone leading on this particular? I can do it Chris. So the membership currently if we look at the membership we have three vacancies for head teachers in the academy section. We have one vacancy for a head teacher in the maintain section. We have one governor vacancy and I think that's in the academy section and we have a post 16-18 membership vacancy. With forums agreement I think we would like to go out again to try and recruit and we started it at BASH Chris as you mentioned it at BASH today but with the agreement forum I'd like to go back out with emails to each sector trying to get those positions filled and then hopefully at the next meeting we will have some new members. I'm not saying we're fillable but we'll have some new members and maybe we can have a discussion about what training you at the forum would like in order for us to bring that to the board with the new members on it. I was asked a question this morning Clyde while you were there, whether a CEO of a of a trust can sit on schools forum? Yes they can yeah CEO stroke head. We believe we have one already and that would be fine. Yeah they would take up the position of a head though. Yeah yeah that's right. Okay any other I said there's sort of talk about a training session for members so taking that forward. I suppose what we need to do is wait and see new people coming on board and then getting that training set up. Yeah okay any other any other comments anyone wishes to make? Okay so that's the last item on the agenda 1440 done well there. Okay have a nice and I thank everyone I thank the local authority for their reports and I thank you for your continued support with schools forum through the year. I do wish you a nice summer holiday when it does finally come to see us okay have a good rest of your day. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks chair. Thank you.