LA Planned Expenditure: UK Local Authority Budgets for Education and Children's Services

Planned Expenditure of Local Authorities on education and Children's social care functions presents budget data returned to the UK Department for Education by Local Authorities. The data covers planned spending for the following financial year on school budgets and Children's services functions, as required by the Apprenticeship, Skills, Children and Learning Act 2009. It is designated as Official Statistics not designated as National Statistics and was last updated on 2026-07-08.

Use Cases

• Benchmarking local authority education spending based on the LA benchmarking tables mentioned in the description
• Analyzing budget allocations for children's social care functions based on the detailed returns
• Tracking year-on-year changes in planned expenditure for school budgets as reported to the DfE

Strengths

• Data is collected under statutory obligations set out in the Apprenticeship, Skills, Children and Learning Act 2009
• Supported by LA benchmarking tables and LA level detailed returns, which suggests structured comparative data
• Last updated on 2026-07-08, indicating a recent data point

Limitations

• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download
• Description metadata is limited; actual data quality requires manual inspection after download

Provenance

Source

Department for Education

Collection Method

Budget / planned expenditure returns submitted by Local Authorities to the DfE

Time Range

Covers planned spending for the following financial year

Freshness

Last updated 2026-07-08 13:31:50.282165

Geography

United Kingdom (Local Authorities)