Sefton: school funding per pupil

What these figures do and don't show

• Different measures at each level. The UK and nation totals are HM Treasury’s spending on education by function. Below them are each publisher’s own measures: DfE’s core schools budget, each authority’s schools block, councils’ net education spending. They are not expected to add up to the level above.
• England is not the UK. Education is devolved. The schools block, school allocations, the school workforce, apprenticeships and the student loan book shown here are England’s, and are never added to UK or other nations’ figures.
• Per pupil is not comparable across nations. England’s schools block, Wales’s figures and Scotland’s council spending per pupil measure different things, so each authority is compared only with its own nation.
• Student loans are lending, not spending. The money lent, repaid and still owed is shown beside the spending, not added to it. Only the part not expected to be repaid counts as spending, on the basis the Office for National Statistics introduced in 2018.
• Nothing here shows cause and effect. Pupils per teacher, apprenticeship starts and other figures are shown alongside the money, not as its result. Areas differ in deprivation, sparsity, pupils with special needs and costs, which is why funding per pupil differs.
• Allocations are not spending. School-level figures are what each school was allocated for the year, not what it spent; the latest schools block year is provisional.