The system of school funding in the UK is a complex one, which has been subject to significant reforms in recent years. Yet the way that central government allocates funding to schools, both directly, and via local authorities in England is poorly documented and ill understood. However, it has some very important implications indeed.

This project aims to remedy this by providing an intuitive guide to how these funding mechanisms operate and their implications. More specifcally, we will examine the "fairness" of these funding mechanisms, i.e. how evenly, or proportional to educational needs, state resources are spread across different children in the state sector. This will be done by looking at the distributional impact of these funding mechanisms along a number of important dimensions such as composition of intake and area-level deprivation. In addition, we will anaylse the financial incentives - resulting from these funding mechanisms - schools face to attract new pupils, and to improve school quality.