Must know: A guide to education

• Despite considerable changes in national education policy and school organisation over recent years, councils retain the bulk of their statutory duties. They have a key role as champions of educational excellence for all children and young people in their areas. 
• Councils must ensure sufficient high-quality school places locally and while thousands of additional places were created over the last decade, falling rolls are a growing issue in many areas. Dealing with this will involve strategic working with all local schools, including academies and free schools. 
• Councils maintain a significant role in ensuring fair school admissions locally and have duties in relation to home-to-school transport for some children and young people. They also maintain a role in the local allocation of school funding. 
• However, significant budget cuts and the increasing number of academies and free schools, directly funded and accountable to the Secretary of State for Education, mean that the council role in school improvement has changed. 
• Schools are increasingly expected to take responsibility for their own improvement and for helping other schools. A variety of models are developing across the country, with councils facilitating and supporting school-to-school improvement partnerships. 
• Councils have duties to ensure that children can access high quality early education and childcare that is high quality and inclusive and ensures children get the best start in life. 

High quality early years education and childcare provision can generate sustained and significant improvements on children’s outcomes reducing disparities in later life. Not only does good quality provision have a positive impact on children’s development, it also ensures that parents and carers can feel confident to access childcare. The Childcare Act 2006 places a duty on councils to improve the wellbeing of young children in their areas and reduce inequalities, including in relation to education. The council must secure ‘early childhood services’ for the benefit of parents, prospective parents and young children, consider the quantity and quality of services, and where in the area they are provided, and consider the views of young children where possible.

All three- to four-year-olds in England can currently get 570 hours of funded early education or childcare per year from the term after their third birthday. This is usually taken as 15 hours a week for 38 weeks of the year, or traditional school term-time. There are no plans to change this funded entitlement. Children of working families (with particular earning limits) are eligible for an addition 15 hours of funded childcare. The current expansion programme of early education entitlements means that by September 2025, working parents of children aged nine months up to three-years-old can access 30 hours per week. Two-year-olds of non-working families can get 15 hours of funded early education and childcare if their parents receive certain benefits. 

Councils are funded for early years provision through the early years block in the dedicated schools grant (DSG). Councils must use a locally-determined, transparent formula – the early years single funding formula (EYSFF) – to allocate the early years block to providers. This can include supplements for issues including deprivation, rurality and flexibility. Providers and the Schools Forum should be consulted on the local formula, and councils must pass through at least 95 per cent of the early years block to providers (this is changing to 96 per cent in 2025/26). The rest can be retained for central costs, such as support for providers. 

For more information on the council role in early education, please see our Early Education and Childcare resource pack.

Councils have a unique responsibility to make sure that there are enough school places available for children and young people in their areas. Fulfilling this duty has been an enormous challenge that councils have risen to creating an additional 600,000 primary school places since 2010 to cope with rising demand. This bulge in pupil numbers has now moved into secondary schools and in many areas the issue of falling rolls is growing. A key challenge will be to work in partnership with all schools to ensure that the number of school places mirrors the current pupil population.

Councils are the admissions authorities for community schools and are responsible for setting their admissions policies and catchment areas. Faith schools (voluntary-aided schools), foundation schools, academies and free schools are responsible for setting their own admissions policies and catchments (they are ‘own admission authorities’). 

Councils are responsible for co-ordinating all school admissions in their areas during the normal rounds at the start of primary and secondary school. This means that parents apply through the council on a common application form and have three to six choices typically, including for schools that are ‘own admission authorities’. 

The statutory duty on councils to coordinate in-year admissions outside the normal rounds has been removed, but many councils still undertake this role with the agreement of local schools. 

All schools and admissions authorities are bound by the statutory admissions code  and if there are concerns about the fairness of a school’s admissions practices, complaints can be made to the Office of the Schools Adjudicator. 

Councils have a statutory duty to raise with the Schools Adjudicator any concerns they have about the admission policies of schools in their areas. They are required to submit an annual report to the Adjudicator about the operation of schools admissions policies in their areas and to publish the report on their website. 

Councils are required to agree a Fair Access Protocol with local schools to place children who are finding it hard to find a school place, have been excluded from school or are new to the area. 

The majority of schools have to agree the protocol which is then binding on all schools, including academies. If a maintained school (faith, foundation or community school) refuses to admit a pupil under the Fair Access Protocol, local authorities have the power to direct them to admit the pupil. In the case of academies and free schools, the council has to apply to the Education and Skills Funding Agency (ESFA) for a direction to admit the pupil. 

Councils are required to offer free school transport to children aged between five and 16 if they go to their nearest suitable school and live at least: 

• two miles from the school if they are under eight
• three miles away if they are eight or older. 

Families on low incomes who are in receipt of certain benefits or are entitled to Free School Meals have greater rights to free transport. 

Councils have to make transport arrangements for all children who cannot reasonably be expected to walk to the nearest suitable school because the nature of the route is deemed unsafe. 

They also have to make transport arrangements for children who cannot reasonably be expected to walk to school because of their mobility problems or because of associated health and safety issues related to their special educational needs or disability (SEND). Many councils are facing significant increases in home-to-school transport costs as the number of children and young people with an Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP) continues to increase.

Councils do not have to provide free transport to young people over the age of 16, but “have a duty to prepare and publish an annual transport policy statement specifying the arrangements for the provision of transport or otherwise that the authority considers it necessary to make to facilitate the attendance of all persons of sixth form age receiving education or training”.

Each year, the Government allocates money for all state-funded mainstream schools, including academies and council-run schools, using a formula that ensures funding is fair and reflects their pupils’ needs.  This is called the National Funding Formula (NFF) and takes a variety of factors into account, such as the number of pupils a school has and how its location may affect the school’s running costs.

The Dedicated Schools Grant (DSG) is the ring-fenced grant from Government that provides each local authority with an allocation of funding for schools and services for pupils. The DSG contains four blocks determined by the national funding formula which calculates the total funding due to Local Authorities. The four blocks that make up the DSG are schools, central schools services, early years and high needs. 

The Department for Education (DfE) has previously planned to implement the direct NFF, which will mean that funding for individual schools will be set by a single, national formula – rather than each local authority having its own local formula to allocate funding for individual schools. In advance of this, many councils have adapted their own local formulae to reflect the factors that make up the NFF.

Councils do however still retain a degree of local flexibility to move funding between blocks to meet need. This flexibility, which is generally used to transfer additional funding into the high needs block, has been curtailed by the DfE over the last decade.

The decisions about the local formula are made in the Schools Forum, which is established and supported by the council. The Forum is required to have representation from schools and providers, including primary, secondary and special schools and nursery providers.

Academies and free schools are funded directly by the Government, through the Education and Skills Funding Agency (ESFA). However, they are funded in line with the locally-agreed formula and academies must also be represented on the Schools Forum. Funding for academies is then recouped from the DSG and paid to them by the ESFA. 

The DfE allocates funding each year to help maintain and improve the condition of school buildings and grounds. At the time of writing, eligible schools can access funding through either: school condition allocations (SCA), with funds paid to eligible bodies responsible for maintaining school buildings, or the Condition Improvement Fund (CIF) – a bidding round with funds paid directly to single academy trusts, small multi-academy trusts (MATs), small voluntary aided (VA) bodies and sixth-form colleges

In addition, devolved formula capital (DFC) is allocated for individual schools and other eligible institutions to spend on capital projects. School condition funding includes capital allocations for: local authorities and local-authority-maintained schools, including maintained nursery schools, local voluntary-aided bodies and voluntary-aided schools, academies and large multi-academy trusts (MATs), sixth-form colleges, non-maintained special schools an special post-16 institutions with eligible students.

Parents have the right to choose to home-educate their children and are then responsible for providing suitable education, including addressing any special needs. They are not required to register with a mainstream school or with the local authority, although some local authorities operate a voluntary registration scheme. 

Local authorities have a duty to identify, as far as is possible, children not receiving a suitable education and intervene, for example, by issuing a school attendance order. However, local authorities have no legal duties to monitor the quality of home education on a regular basis and no powers to insist on seeing a child in order to establish whether they are receiving a suitable education. 

Councils are responsible for arranging suitable education for permanently excluded pupils, and for other pupils who – because of illness or other reasons – would not receive suitable education without such arrangements being made. This is known as Alternative Provision (AP). Councils retain an important role in supporting local fair access arrangements to ensure that children without school places are placed as quickly as possible in an appropriate setting, both convening schools and overseeing the operation of the Fair Access Protocol. 

Councils have a range of responsibilities to support children and young people with SEND, including making sure that they can access a suitable education, including early education and childcare. For full details of the council role, take a look at our SEND must know guide.. 

The council role in school improvement has changed considerably. There are increasing numbers of academies and free schools, directly funded and overseen by the Department for Education (DfE) and increasing autonomy for all schools. A significant majority of secondary schools are now academies. 

The council role has become more strategic and schools are increasingly expected to take responsibility for their own improvement and to help other schools that are struggling. However, this is a crucial area of importance for every council and most formal statutory responsibilities remain.

Children’s services have a legal responsibility to promote the wellbeing of all local children. Councillors will always have a keen interest in school standards locally to improve the educational outcomes and life chances of local children and young people. 

The Department for Education’s regional directors have a broad role, working across children’s social care, SEND and education, acting on behalf of the Secretary of State for Education. Their main responsibilities include with regards to education include addressing underperformance in schools, academies, children’s social care and special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) services, offering support, and where necessary intervening, to deliver rapid improvement; taking decisions on academy sponsor matches and significant changes to academies; deciding on new free schools; taking decisions on the creation, consolidation and growth of multi-academy trusts (MATs) and supporting local authorities to ensure that every local area has sufficient places for pupils.

• Is there a good take up of early education entitlements in your area? Is there sufficient early education and childcare?
• Is the quality of provision high? 
• How do the standards of schools in your area compare to national averages and to the results in similar neighbouring council areas? 
• What are the arrangements for supporting school improvement for your area? 
• Are there any council-maintained schools causing concern in your local area? What is being done in those schools to support improvement? 
• How many primary and secondary school places are available locally? What do projections for school places look like over the next five years
• Does your local area have enough spaces to meet local demand? 
• What are your local school maintenance needs and how is local schools capital funding allocated? 
• Are any locally maintained schools in need of significant central government funding for rebuilding projects?