Accountability for the money. The main form of accountability for the money spent was that the Coordinators were responsible for providing regular budget updates to their local ABP meetings. The ABP members attending the meetings, led by the Chair, were responsible for ascertaining how well the money was being spent. This seemed to focus on maintaining the agreed thresholds for accessing ABP funding; that is, members challenging each other to seek to ensure that all other possibilities within the resources of a school/area had been tried before turning to the ABP for money: ‘It’s not that you have to tick every box before you come to the ABP but we question each other.’ (Coordinator) ‘Parity is important’. [The system] requires all schools in the ABP to do as much in school as possible before coming to the ABP. (School 6, notes) It was not clear that all four ABPs in fact operated in this way. In one area, there was reported pressure from some members who argued that the use of exclusion was the right of individual headteachers. In that ABP, such views indicate that there may have been less peer challenge when a school sought ABP funding to prevent an exclusion. A second type of accountability mentioned in the interviews focused on the quality of the alternative provision being bought with the devolved funding. The LA-ABP Partnership Agreement made quality of alternative provision the responsibility of each school using it; a responsibility which could be devolved to a, ‘third party (e.g. the Coordinator)’ (Clause 10.9), with the LA becoming involved if quality issues persist despite school attempts to resolve them (Clause 10.11). During the interviews, no- one discussed quality being formally accounted for by the ABPs. However, the issue of the variable quality of alternative provision included in the Framework Agreement was widely discussed. One senior leader (School 4) explicitly questioned whether there was enough discussion at ABP-level as to whether or not the alternative provision bought using Tier 3 money was good value for money. This interviewee recognised that there was a practical problem in that the ABPs (or schools) had to pay for alternative provision ‘upfront’, before they knew whether or not the quality would be sufficient to lead to positive outcomes for their pupil. In a different ABP, this issue had begun to be addressed by the introduction of contracts with providers that included an element of ‘payment by results’ worth 10% for part-time provision and 20% for full...
