The methodology document should be referenced alongside this data. It provides information on the data sources, their coverage and quality as well as explaining methodology used in producing the data.
Coverage
The Statistical Publication: ‘School Finance in England’ provides the latest information at national, regional and local level on the expenditure on schools, education and children's and young people's services by local authorities. Alongside the local authority spending, the release also provides a detailed breakdown of income and expenditure by schools, with aggregations to the local authority, regional and national level. The publication summarises the information that was collected via the October 2020 Consistent Financial Reporting (CFR) and S251 collections (with collection of both being delayed due to Covid-19). It supersedes the 2019 data release, which was provided as an Excel spreadsheet (LA_and_school_expenditure_2018-19_Tables.xlsx (opens in a new tab)).
The release is being made in two stages, with the S251 data (spending by local authorities) being released on 21st January 2021 and the CFR data (schools finances) being released on 11th February 2021. The CFR data will also be available at an individual school level via the Schools Financial Benchmarking website.
This publication includes information on:
Local authority spending on schools and other education - time-series giving the detailed breakdown of spending split by school-phase and overall spending area (e.g. individual schools budget, expenditure on free school meals, SEN support etc).
Local authority spending on children's and young people's services - time-series giving the detailed breakdown of spending split by provision sector (e.g. own, private, voluntary) and spending area (e.g. sure start centres, family services, youth justice etc).
Schools' income and expenditure - time-series giving the detailed breakdown of schools income and expenditure by school phase and financial area (e.g. staff, estates and buildings, etc)
Schools' revenue balances - time-series giving the overall financial balance data for schools and overall numbers of schools in surplus and deficit.
File formats and conventions
The data files are provided in comma-separated values format, which is compatible with standard spreadsheet software such as Excel.
The following symbols are used in the underlying data files as follows:
: Not available - this information has not been collected or there are no estimates available at this level of aggregation.
N/A Not available - this is normally where a statistic cannot be produced. For example where a denominator is not available to produce a percentage.
z = not applicable. The 'z' symbol is only to be used when an observation is not applicable (e.g. in tables of employment where people under 16 cannot legally be employed).
Data files
All data files associated with this releases are listed below with guidance on their content. To download any of these files, please visit our data catalogue.
CFR School Income and Expenditure (National, Regional, LA levels))
Filename
cfr_incomeexp_v2.csv
Geographic levels
Local authority; National; Regional
Time period
2014-15 to 2019-20
Content
Income and expenditure of LA maintained schools
Variable names and descriptions
Variable names and descriptions for this file are provided below:
Variable name
Variable description
Category
Financial category
Description
Financial entry
ReportGroup
Income/Expenditure
school_phase
School phase
Value
Total
ValueFY_perpupil
Per pupil
Footnotes
There are a small number of local authorities with no LA maintained secondary schools, all are academies.