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 summer 2021 Consistent Financial Reporting (CFR) and S251 Outturn collections . It supersedes the January 2021 data release.
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.
LA maintained schools, all expenditure (National, Regional, LA levels) (£million)
Filename
la_maintained_schools_expenditure_final.csv
Geographic levels
Local authority; National; Regional
Time period
2015-16 to 2020-21
Content
This file contains expenditure data for local authority maintained schools collected via the Consistent Financial reporting data collection.
Variable names and descriptions
Variable names and descriptions for this file are provided below:
Variable name
Variable description
expenditure_£million
Expenditure (£ million)
expenditure_description
Category of expenditure
expenditure_per_pupil
Expenditure per pupil
school_phase
Phase of education - Filter by school type
Footnotes
There are a small number of local authorities with no LA maintained secondary schools, all are academies.
S251 Outturn - Children and Young People's Services (National, Regional, LA levels)
Filename
s251outturn_cypservices.csv
Geographic levels
Local authority; National; Regional
Time period
2015-16 to 2020-21
Content
This file contains details of expenditure on children's services, and young peoples services by local authorities collected via the Section 251 Outturn return.
Variable names and descriptions
Variable names and descriptions for this file are provided below:
Variable name
Variable description
description_of_expenditure
Category of expenditure - Filter by expenditure category
grants_inside_AEF
Grants inside of aggregate external finance (£ million)
grants_outside_AEF
Grants outside of aggregate external finance (£ million)
income
Income (£ million)
net_current_expenditure
Total net current expenditure (£ million)
net_revenue_expenditure
Net revenue expenditure (£ million)
other_public_sector_provision
Spend on other public sector provision (£ million)
S251 Outturn - Schools and other education (National, Regional, LA levels)
Filename
s251outturn_schools_education.csv
Geographic levels
Local authority; National; Regional
Time period
2015-16 to 2020-21
Content
This file contains details of school expenditure and other education and community expenditure by local authorities collected via the Section 251 Outturn return.
Variable names and descriptions
Variable names and descriptions for this file are provided below:
Variable name
Variable description
category_of_expenditure
Category of expenditure - Filter by expenditure category