§ Mr. Dave WattsTo ask the Secretary of State for Education and Skills how many children aged between four and 18 years are in schools in local education authorities; if she will list the funding allocated to each school under her Department's proposed options; and if she will publish the deprivation allocation from additional educational needs under the Government's options(a) with and (b) without any ethnicity-weighting factor. [77160]
§ Mr. MilibandThere were 7,438,964 pupils between 4 and 18 in maintained schools in local education authorities recorded in the most recent annual schools census. It is not possible to identify the funding allocated to each school under the options set out in the consultation paper on Local Government Finance issued on 8 July: that would depend on decisions to be taken by LEAs on their formulae for distributing funding to their schools. The amounts of funding distributed for additional educational needs, and within that for ethnicity and English as an additional language (EAL), under each of the four consultation options is set out in the table below:
Funding for 2002–03 Option 1 Option 2 Option 3 Option 4 Deprivation Funding(£m) 4,880 4,118 4,940 4,006 Ethnicity/EALFunding (£m) 600 421 600 431 The levels of funding in these options are based on research from PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). If an alternative method of funding AEN were used, it would 710W be necessary to consider how it could fit with the evidence from the PwC study, which associated substantial costs with the incidence of EAL.