School funding review

Background

School funding is a highly topical policy issue in Wales and the rest of the UK. Concerns have been raised about the level of school spending per pupil, differences across local authorities and whether funding levels are sufficient to meet the needs of pupils in different parts of the country.

Such concerns led the Senedd Children, Young People and Education Committee to launch an inquiry into school funding in Wales. This inquiry resulted in a range of recommendations published in their 2019 School Funding in Wales report, including recommendation 1:

That the Welsh Government commission an urgent review of how much funding is required to fund schools sufficiently in Wales, particularly given the level of reform currently being undertaken. The review should: 

• consider, as its basis, what the basic minimum cost is of running a school and educating a child in Wales, before allocating additional resources required for other factors such as deprivation and sparsity and local circumstances
• provide an estimate of the current funding gap between the amount currently spent on schools and the amount required to deliver on all that is required of them, including the considerable reform agenda

The Welsh Government wrote to the Committee in September 2019 with its response to the recommendations and agreed that “a review of this nature has merit".

Review of school spending

Luke Sibieta, an independent consultant and expert on school funding, was commissioned to assist the Welsh Government to respond to recommendation 1 in the Children, Young People and Education Committee’s report.

Kirsty Williams, AM, Minister for Education published a written statement on 24 October 2019. 

Luke Sibieta’s Review of School Spending in Wales was published in 2020.

Response to the recommendations

In July 2022, the Welsh Government provided an update on its response to the recommendations of the Review of School Spending in Wales to the Children, Young People and Education Committee. 

The independent Review of School Spending in Wales by Luke Sibieta provides valuable evidence to inform future funding and policy decisions. It has highlighted the complexity of the funding system. We are working with stakeholders at all levels to work through these complexities. 

A wide range of Welsh Government portfolios are involved in the education system and the funding available to our children and young people. Many areas cut across and are relevant to a number of the recommendations both in the Review into School Spending in Wales by Luke Sibieta and the Children, Young People and Education Committee’s 2019 School Funding in Wales report. Therefore, we have established an internal stakeholder group to coordinate and manage this work. 

Following the recommendations, we have also commissioned various pieces of research to ensure we have the latest evidence to help inform policy making.

We conducted a review of local authority school funding formulae and a summary of the findings from the school funding formula review and recommendations was published in February 2025. The intention of this analysis was to better understand the complexities and decision-making processes in relation to schools funding formulae across Wales. The review enables us to consider how the system can be improved to enable more transparent, comparable and consistent funding across Welsh schools.

We have also established a working group with local authority representatives and are reviewing school funding regulations.

Contact details

email: Education.InfrastructureGovAndFinance@gov.wales

Post:

Education Infrastructure, Governance and Finance Division
The Education Directorate
Welsh Government
Cathays Park
Cardiff
CF10 3NQ