The Financing of School-based Education: Changing the Additional Educational Needs Allowance

The additional educational needs (AEN) component of the education standard spending assessment (SSA) is designed to finance the costs of meeting additional educational needs associated with social deprivation and ethnic minority status. Following a recent review by the Department for Education (DFE), the money allocated to local authorities to cover these needs has decreased markedly. This has led to a significant reduction in resources made available by central government to certain metropolitan authorities, and especially inner London authorities. It is argued that the strategy for determining the AEN weighting is undermined by a demonstrable influence of spending constraints imposed by central government. Urgent attention needs to be given to rethinking the strategy, so that the education SSAs can better reflect the true needs of local education authorities (LEAs). In our view, it would be preferable to have an approach based on actual needs and associated costs. There is a growing consensus that the m...