The government’s new ‘apprenticeship levy’ is a levy on UK employers to fund new apprenticeships.  It’s due from all employers with an annual pay bill of over £3 million – who will have to put 0.5 per cent of their pay bill into the fund.

If you’re a school that’s run by the council, whether as a community school or a ‘voluntary controlled’ school, the pay bill that matters isn’t yours, it’s the county council’s as they are the employer of your staff.  So even the smallest local authority schools in Cambridgeshire will have to pay 0.5 per cent of their pay bill to the Government.

However, if you’re an academy or a voluntary aided school, it might be a different story.  If the trust that runs you is too small to reach the £3 million pay bill threshold, you won’t have to contribute to the apprenticeship levy, even if you’re the same size as (or even bigger than) the next door local authority school that does.  And that doesn’t seem fair to me.

There are a lot of other changes to education funding going on this year which will increase or decrease the cash going to individual schools.  The government is short-changing schools by not inflation-proofing the grant it gives them (bad news).  On the other hand, the government is proposing a national funding formula (good news) whose effect has been to move money away from relatively well funded urban areas into rural areas. On the third hand, they have increased the deprivation component and reduced the lump sum that goes to all schools, so some small rural schools serving non-deprived areas will see a small loss.

So it’s a complicated picture of swings and roundabouts, not just a slide.  But it seems wrong that all local authority schools, however small, will have to pay the apprenticeship levy, while the same rules won’t apply to some academies.

With thanks to Huntingdonshire’s Cllr Peter Downes for advising on the technicalities of the rules. Any remaining errors are mine.