Legal action threatened by The Downs School in Compton furious at West Berkshire Council cash clawback

Schools in West Berkshire are preparing to take legal action against the council for clawing back cash in their accounts.

The council is raiding their bank accounts for around £2.4m – so it can reduce a £9m debt in its budget for special needs education.

The Downs School in Newbury has written to parents outlining the legal move – saying that £490,000 of £700,000 it has raised through fundraising activities has also been lasooed by the council.

Cash had been allocated for new toilets to be built there later this year.

Headteacher Chris Prosser wrote this in a letter to parents at the weekend.

“We raised this money over the last three years because we knew that otherwise we would not get the funding we needed to make essential improvements to the fabric and facilities of the school.

"This money is self-generated income, raised by the hard work of the school, staff and parents.

“West Berkshire Council’s actions put in jeopardy the essential maintenance and improvements we had planned.

"For example, we will not be able to create new classrooms that meet the needs of our students.

"We will not be able to improve the school's toilet facilities, which we had pledged to our students would be a priority.

"We will not be able to make our sports facilities fit for purpose.”

West Berkshire Council has a deficit of about £9m in its special educational needs (SEN) provision.

As the council only has about £4m in its savings account, this would normally make it vulnerable to bankruptcy.

Local education authorities (LEAs) have the power to claw back balances which they regard as too high.

The clawback bombshell dropped at the WBC Schools Forum on Monday.

Documents for that meeting say: “The maximum amount that could be clawed back each year is the amount of school balance in excess of 10 per cent of their budget share. This is subject to leaving the schools with a minimum of £50,000 balance.”

The paper identifies about a dozen schools from which a total of about £2.85m would be clawed back.

One of the hardest hit schools in the clawback move is Brookfields – which is an SEN school.

Schools were given 15-minute slots to present their budgets – and to demonstrate what funds had been allocated where to the council.

This claw-back was due to happen from April next year, but WBC pulled it forward to this year.

Councillor David Marsh (Green, Wash Common) tried but failed to raise the issue at last Thursday’s full council asking: “Is WBC aware that this week’s decision to claw back some £2.8m from agreed school budgets – three months into the financial year, having initially promised that there would be no such 'clawback' until 2025 – has caused anger, dismay and distress in schools across the district, created a huge amount of work for hard-pressed headteachers and business managers in the last full week of the school year, and so undermined relations between maintained schools and the local authority that the council’s strategy – 'endeavour to retain current schools within the local authority rather than becoming academies/joining multi-academy trusts' – is put at risk?"