Authorities (LA's) are required under section 52 of the School Standards and Framework Act 1998 to prepare a budget statement before the beginning of each year i.e. by 31st March. After the end of that financial year they are required to prepare an outturn statement. Separate regulations and guidance apply to budget statements.


Purpose of Financial Statements

The statement is intended to:
provide schools, parents and others with an interest in education with details about schools and LA funding and expenditure;
provide data for the Departmental Annual Report (DAR);
inform policy making;
inform the Treasury for monitoring purposes;
inform Parliament in its role of monitoring the department's accountability for public funds. MPs ask about school and authority expenditure via the mechanisms of Parliamentary Questions of through the Education Select Committee
 

The outturn statement comprises of 3 sections:

Table A - Spending by schools and LA information is linked with the collection of Consistent Financial Reporting (CFR) data from schools:
the upper part of the Table is the 'Spending by Schools' section and will be pre-populated with information taken from the CFR database if this data has been submitted and verified before Section 52 templates are dispatched.
the lower part is the 'Spending by LA' section to show what the authority has spent at the centre but not the funding passed to schools.

The Youth Service Annex relates to expenditure on the LEA's Youth Service. The annex provides a further break down of expenditure shown at line 80 of Table A

Table B is School level information. It provides a summary of individual schools' expenditure and income


Please note the following in relation to 2004-2005.


Additional Text for 2004-05 Outturn to explain errors:

The outturn data is recorded on templates supplied by the DfES and all LA's with educational responsibility must complete the template. On occasions this may mean that errors are recorded on the tables (shown in cells shaded red) as the template is in a common format. Each of these errors are explained in the notes at the end of the tables and are not due to financial errors.