Agenda item

(Report by Mr K Abbott, Director Resource and Planning Group, Mr G Ward, Director Capital Programme and Infrastructure Group and Mrs S Hohler, Cabinet Member for Children, Families & Education)

(1)         Members considered the third report to this Committee on the forecast outturn against the budget for the Children, Families and Education (CFE) Directorate for the 2009/10 financial year based on the exception monitoring report, which was presented to Cabinet on 12 October 2009.

(2)         The Chairman asked Mr Abbott to introduce the report.  He highlighted the areas under the various headings within the report that required further updates which included; Schools - It was the intention to provide Members with an update of the half year monitoring position, however, Officers were still chasing a number of returns from schools, which meant that the work on assessing the overall position was still taking place.  Mr Abbott offered to forward a briefing note to Members outside the meeting as the next meeting was not due until January 2010.   Directorate Revenue Budget – The Directorate was projecting a balanced budget for the end of the year excluding asylum and including management action of £1.571m, the position of the Directorate was largely the same as reported at the last meeting.  Asylum – The new grant  rules that came into effect from the end of August had a lot of clauses that came into effect on the 1^st October this meant the grant rules had changed after one month, which meant the forecast shortfall increased from £0.369m to £3.969m for the end of the year.  At the time of writing the report Officers were waiting for proposal from the UK Borders Agency (UKBA) following a meeting held with them and the Leader of KCC in September.  Outlined proposal had been received that were broadly what was expected in trying to find a way forward  to provide KCC and the other main gateway authorities; Hillenden and Croydon, with a contractual arrangement for 3-5 years to essentially fund core costs and allow for some variation for changes in numbers in each year. The first meeting involving Hillenden, Croydon and KCC with the UKBA was being held in Croydon 19 November KCC was being represented by Mr B Anderson accompanied by an Officer from the finance team from Asylum Services.  Mr Abbott agreed to give Members an update at the joint meeting in January 2010.  Members were advised that a Member of the UKBA had been seconded to KCC, until the end of March 2010, to work within the Children, Families and Education Directorate in the Finance Team and the Unaccompanied Children’s Team to look at the funding and service issues that KCC was facing and dealing with the issues where UKBA and KCC interpretations differed.   Mr Abbott hoped that this would also strengthen the partnership the UKBA and feed into discussions.

(3)         In response to a question by Mr Chittenden that referred to page 10 of the report on the ‘ongoing’ increase in expenditure for mobile classrooms in schools with regard to the changes in special educational needs requirements.  Mr Ward explained that the figures within the capital programme were anticipated at the end of the programme 2013/14 published County Council budget.   There was a commitment to provide additional accommodation in relation to post 16, it was hoped that this was not the end result but that they were fit for purpose facilities to allow the school to provide post 16 on site.  On some of the other schools KCC was incurring additional costs of providing mobiles in advance of the final solutions, he gave the example of the Ridgeview and Portall schools where additional mobiles were provided in advance of the additional building work as part of the Building Schools for the Future.  In this case the mobiles were an interim solution to allow the schools to meet the requirements to their public notice etc.              

(4)                           RESOLVED that:-

(a)               the Members comments be noted ;

(b)               a further update on Asylum be brought back to the joint January meeting of the three CFE POSCs ; and

(c)        the projected outturn figures for both the revenue and capital budgets for the directorate as at the August exception monitoring report be noted.