Education and Inspections Bill

In the case of a current head, the extra money would go to the school. Perhaps it will be clearer if I make a few more comments on funding. Establishing the SIP function is an important change for a local authority, and the Government are providing them with funding to facilitate it. The level of funding recognises both the cost of the SIP function—to which the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe referred—and the savings to authorities that the SIP function makes possible. The cost of the SIP function arises from the allocation of SIP time to each school and the allocation of time for each SIP to take part in updating and professional development. Savings arise because, when SIPs start work with an authority’s schools, the authority can discontinue the link adviser function through which authorities currently hold schools to account. We estimated time allocations and costs for the SIP functions from our experience in trials of the new relationship with schools. We took link adviser time allocations and costs from the benchmarking data. We expect SIP work with each school to require, as I said earlier, about five days a year. Our information suggests that the current link adviser work with a school typically takes three days a year excluding any follow-up school improvement work. We therefore need to subsidise local authorities for the extra two days required for SIPs beyond the current school link work and for SIP-related professional development for SIPs who are serving heads. The subsidy amounts to £2,000 per school with authority set-up costs of £380 per secondary school and £770 per primary. That funding is expected to meet about 75 per cent of authorities’ costs. To save time, perhaps I may undertake to write to all noble Lords on funding, payment and costs. I hope that that will be suitable.