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<p>The Department informed Local Authorities and academy trusts of the republished
schools National Funding Formula (NFF) on 6 October 2023, alongside the publication
of the corrected NFF allocations. In the initial NFF calculations for 2024-2025, there
was an error processing forecast pupil numbers, which meant that the overall cost
of the core schools budget using the announced schools NFF arrangements would be 0.62%
greater than allocated. The Permanent Secretary has taken full responsibility for
the error made by officials and has written to both the Secretary of State and the
Education Select Committee to apologise.</p><p>Since identifying the error, officials
have reviewed other funding models to confirm that a similar issue has not occurred
elsewhere. The Secretary of State has asked the Department's Permanent Secretary to
conduct an independent and external review of the quality assurance process surrounding
the calculation of the NFF. This will provide external and independent scrutiny and
will be led by Peter Wyman CBE. Officials will ensure that any recommendations from
the review are applied to other allocation calculations done by the Department, not
just the schools NFF.</p><p>The schools NFF calculations are mainly performed using
R and RStudio. R is an open source programming language which is widely used for data
analysis and processing across the public and private sectors, and RStudio is an open
source development environment for using R.</p>
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