Comparing Apples with Spanners - Comparative Cost Review of Non- Maintained and Independent Special Schools with Local Authority Maintained special schools Claire Dorer

Access to Data In March, a Freedom of Information Request led to S251 data from each Local Authority being published on the DfE website. For the first time, we had the opportunity to see the cost of LA maintained special school provision in each authority. Individual schools began to make comparisons with their closest equivalent schools – NMISS appeared to be competitive.

The Project We wanted to carry out a quick study that would inform NASS actions and lobbying in the wake of the SEND Green Paper Consultation We wanted to compare a representative sample of schools with LA data We wanted the work to be carried out by a credible, independent partner and selected Baker Tilly on the basis of their experience of this area of work

The Sample Needed to be small to be manageable But needed to represent as wide a range of different NASS schools and locations as possible Needed schools who would be able to respond quickly over a short period of time in Summer schools were selected

Comparing Apples with Spanners? Some variables could be compared between our schools and LA schools relatively easily Many areas required adjustments e.g. adding the costs of care related activity onto LA and day NASS schools We made use of the Personal Social Services Research Unit data from University of Kent to provide Unit costs for care and therapies

Average cost of provision 52 week (£) 38 weeks (£) Non-residential (£) LA provision (£) Fees paid by LA167,00095,00055,00026,636 Total adjustments-6,592 to 17,37947,45991,985 Total package cost167,000101,592 to 112,379102,459118,621 The Findings

Key Points If you compare the costs of full packages of support across sectors, NMISS are not consistently more expensive than LA provision – they generally work out cheaper 52 week a year provision appears to offer considerable additional services at relatively little additional cost We have made a comparison with the median cost of LA provision – we might argue that NMISS provision is closest to the highest cost LA special schools

What next? This pilot has been valuable in helping NASS and member schools to have evidence-based dialogue with LA colleagues and policy makers These figures can be challenged by others – we welcome the debate! We hope both NASS members and LAs will use the matrix provided by the study to calculate their own costs and use this data for comparison with their local Special Schools

What more are we doing? This is a small pilot study – since April we have been carrying out an expanded study, covering approx 50 schools This project tells us about cost – it is a starting point but it doesn’t tell us about value for money Impact and outcome measures will still be crucial in making the case for the value of NMISS – we are conducting further work on Social Return on Investment