Charging schools for training

[Emily Tester]

Can you assist me? I have been asked to review our charges and look at charging the schools for their training which at the moment is free. I currently don’t have enough funding (which is probably the same throughout each authority) to deliver all the training that schools want. My holiday courses are charged although they will be going up shortly.

Do you charge your schools ? How much do you charge your schools? Can you let me know how your charges are calculated? How many hours do you take for each level that you deliver? I look forward to hearing from you. Many thanks for any assistance.

[Jane Deeley]

Hi Emily, I assume you are talking about Bikeability here? We pay our instructors on a ‘per head trained’ basis for 10 hours at L1&2 or 3 hours at L3, and use most of the grant this way. We have charged schools a nominal top-up fee for some years to cover admin & materials. It certainly doesn’t cover all central staff costs! This increases annually in line with inflation & will be £5.45 from Sept. Most schools pass cost on to parents. All payments go through a central council online system run by our traded services team. We don’t run many holiday sessions, but charge parents/carers £10 per head due to increased admin & to encourage attendance. We also charge for scooter training in schools. We worked out approx staff and travel costs across the county, based on max numbers per day/cohort allowing for some to be more cost effective than others, depending on large suburban schools close to County Hall, compared to small rural ones, and settled on £5 (also now £5.45) per head which schools have been generally happy to pay – some use PE funding. Sessions are an hour for each child/group. We try to make it very clear to schools & parents that, although the Bikeability & scooter charges may look the same, one is very heavily subsidised by Gov! We don’t currently charge for pedestrian training, but that is still an option for the future.

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