More than £5m of Hertfordshire's schools' budget would be moved from secondary to primary schools, if the council were to adopt the government's 'national funding formula', according to data presented to headteachers.

And that has prompted claims by a leading headteacher that primary schools in the county are being disproportionately funded – compared to secondary schools – as a result.

The 'national funding formula' – or NFF – is used by the government to determine the amount of money allocated to mainstream schools in a particular area.

And then each local authority can allocate the money to individual schools based on their own local formula.

There are already existing requirements for council's to move their local formula closer to the NFF.

And a report presented to the latest meeting of the Hertfordshire Schools Forum highlighted the impact of directly applying the national formula in Hertfordshire.

It suggested that should the national formula be applied directly to schools, funding would increase for the county's primary schools – but would decrease for secondary schools.

In some cases, data in the report suggests that funding allocated to individual secondary schools would decrease by up to £150k a year – with some secondary schools seeing their allocation cut by more than two per cent.

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And it suggested funding for some primary schools could increase by more than £100k a year – with some primaries seeing their allocation increase by around five per cent.

Overall the data – based on the allocation made to Hertfordshire schools in 2025/26 – suggests primary budgets would increase by £5.58m and secondary budgets would decrease by £5.66m.

And at the meeting that prompted a suggestion that primary schools in the county were currently being "under-funded".

During the discussion Rob Staples – headteacher at Fairlands Primary School – asked what the rationale was for "the under-funding of primary versus the over-funding of key stage four" in the county.

And he suggested that historically Hertfordshire had chosen to "over-fund" key stage four at the "expense" of the primary sector – with no clear rationale.

He pointed to the changes in the cohorts of young people in primary schools.

And he suggested that if they could not "get it right" in primary school there were going to be huge problems in the future.

Meanwhile Matt Gauthier, headteacher at the Samuel Ryder Academy, warned against the use of terms such as "over-funding", because, he said, they were all under-funded.

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And while he said he was supportive of putting more money into the primary sector, he suggested they needed to "increase the cake for everyone".

Martin Atkinson – headteacher at Beaumont School – also suggested that there already wasn't enough money to go around.

And he suggested that if there were to be a massive decrease in secondary funding there would be "significant consequences for young people".

Following a suggestion from Forum chairman Alan Gray, executive headteacher Sandringham School and CEO of the Ambition Education Trust, it was determined that the discussion would continue at the next meeting, with additional information about the schools that would be impacted.

He stressed that all schools were "struggling". And he said that the golden principle was to manage the turbulence in changing the formula, so there weren't unintended consequences.

He said that they wanted the best for schools and that their job, as a collective, was to come up with the best solution.

According to the report presented to the Forum there have been "a number of indications that DfE intends to move towards a 'direct' NFF where local formulae are no longer in use."