Agenda item

To receive and consider a report giving details of the current schools’ financial position.

Coral Miller stated that the report provided details of the schools revenue monitoring 2017/18.  She explained that the report was due to be updated to include the schools’ submissions at the end of the summer term.  At this stage it was anticipated that the Centrally Retained and the De-delegated budgets would be fully spent year end.

Coral stated that as shown in Appendix A, the only variance was a forecast overspend of £385k in the High Needs Block, although the service was looking to contain this.

During the discussion of the item the following comments were made:

·           Janet Perry, Holt School Business Manager stated that she had looked at past papers submitted to the Forum and she had noticed that the papers submitted in December projected a surplus for the March 2018 budget.  Also, the report in Agenda Item 54.1 showed a column D that had not been presented to Forum before and this showed a projected outturn of zero. Janet noticed a significant difference between this report and previous reports, with this report presenting a deficit of £385k at the end of next March.  Janet was seeking clarification as to why the numbers had shifted so substantially;

·           Coral stated that she was reviewing with senior officers the 2017/18 financial position to ensure the forecast was correct.  The current position was as stated in the report;

·           Jane stated that the £385k deficit was due to the High Needs Block, she was working to contain this deficit;

·           Janet emphasized that a predicted surplus in previous reports seemed to have disappeared and she was looking for an explanation as this was a significant amount of money.  Jane agreed to investigate this with John Ogden, Head of Finance and ensure that there was a report back to Forum with the minutes;

·           Paul summarised that what seemed to have happened was that between the draft budget that was submitted in December and the column called ‘Revised 2017/18 Budget as at April 2017’ there looked to have been a movement of about 1.3 million which was the balance that was being carried forward supposedly at the end of March from the December figures;

·           Carole Simpson, Colleton Primary School Business Manager noted that the new format of the report was easier to read and interpret;

·           Paul stated that it was important to have consistency in the report formatting;

·           The Forum asked for the addition of a row that summed up Total Expenditure in the same way as for Total Income so that the totals for each could be seen;

·           It was agreed that there would not be report format changes from meeting to meeting unless agreed by the Forum;

·           John Bayes, Vice-Chairman stated that he would like to have more clarity between the positive and negative figures;

·           Ginny Rhodes, St Crispins School Headteacher asked to ascertain if there was a critical issue or not.  Jane stated that she would get more clarity on the points raised with John Ogden, but any projections were also dependent on the final settlement from the government.  Jane stated that the final settlement normally arrived by the end of July, so it may be possible to give a final position with the minutes;

·           Paul stated that he would investigate the issue raised by Janet with John, Coral and Jane; 

·           DerrenGray, Piggott School Headteacher asked what was the narrative behind the following:

o   The decrease from £250k to 0 in the ‘additional school grants’ row in Total Income from column C to D;

o   The decrease in ‘support costs’ in the Centrally Retained Schools Block from £265k to 0;

o   The disappearance of the miscellaneous row which was £97k;

o   The disappearance of the cost of servicing Schools Forum which was £4k.  

Paul asked Jane and Coral to investigate all the issues raised. 

Jane stated that she had discovered that there had been an agreement with Northern House that the Local Authority would pay for top ups for children, including for children from outside of the Borough.  However, the normal funding agreement was that the host funding authority would pay for the place funding and each local authority would pay for top ups.  When Northern House became an academy an agreement was made that this local authority would pay all for tops and then recoup the top up money from the other authorities.  It appeared that at the moment Northern House had charged a greater amount of top up to Wokingham Borough Council than the likely recoupable amount from other authorities, therefore there was a risk to the High Needs Block budget in terms of that amount, which was included in the £385k. 

Jane stated that additionally, there was an agreement of a £200k payment to the Oaks resource base Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) provision which had not been profiled in the budget.  

John Bayes noted the variance in the High Needs Block row in the Total Income block that also needed clarification.

RESOLVED That:

1)     Jane Winterbone would investigate with senior officers about the discrepancies between budget monitoring reports and ascertain the real budget positon and report back to the Forum as soon as possible;

2)     The new report format was adopted and any changes in formatting would be subject to approval by Schools Forum;

3)     Future reports would clearly identify positive and negative figures.