Description
This document describes the data included in the School Finance in England National Statistics release’s underlying data files. This data is released under the terms of the Open Government License (opens in new tab) and is intended to meet at least 3 stars for Open Data (opens in new tab).
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: ‘LA and School Expenditure’ 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 2023 Consistent Financial Reporting (CFR) and S251 Outturn collections. It supersedes the December 2022 data release.
The CFR data is also available at an individual school level via the Schools Financial Benchmarking (opens in new tab)website.
This publication includes information on:
- Local authority spending on schools and other education - time-series giving the detailed breakdown of spending by local authorities 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 by local authorities 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 LA maintained 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 LA maintained schools and overall numbers of schools in surplus and deficit.
Rounded data files contain national level data rounded to the nearest £ million. These files are intended to provide national level summaries of financial data. Unrounded data files contain local authority, regional and national unrounded financial data.
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 = Only to be used when an observation is not applicable (e.g. in tables of employment where people under 16 cannot legally be employed).