The DSG is a government earmarked grant to be used to support school budgets. The highest pressure is a £1.5million overrun in the High Needs Block, which funds and supports children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities.

A five-year deficit management plan has been developed for the Ministry of Education to inspect how it will deal with its money problems and outline the savings it will achieve.

READ MORE: Windsor & Maidenhead could see a £13.7m black hole in the schools budget

Speaking at a school forum, Mr Norris predicted they would be able to meet the £13.7million savings target, but warned there was no no room for “slippage” and that it could cut services that they “wouldn’t normally like to cut” if they don’t reach their savings goal within five years.

In the report, it says Maintained Schools, which are local authority supervised schools, saw an additional £3million in their balances. This is money that was allocated to schools in previous years, but not spent on things like bike sheds.

However, Achieving for Children said it would review this due to financial pressures and determine whether it is ‘appropriate for any excess balance to be held at the school level’.

Customer Stuart Carroll

Cllr Stuart Carroll (Con: Boyn Hill), senior member of children’s services, said it was an “option” to redistribute the £3million to other maintained schools or to reduce the DSG deficit.

He said DSG deficits are a national problem as other local authorities struggle with overspending. Cllr Carroll also said he was urging the government to reform the funding formula to ensure certain schools with ‘specific circumstances’ are properly supported.

Asked if he was confident the £13.7million black hole would be closed within five years, Cllr Carroll said: “Am I confident the plans we have in place are the right plans and that we have the right oversight and accountability? Absolutely, but I can’t ignore the fact that we need some of this national refresh and the changes to the [DSG] funding formula to enable local schools and local authorities to be firmly in the position where they can achieve.

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“It has to be a mixture of very good local deficit management plans to make things better, transformation and being more vigorous in doing things differently – and I am very confident that we are doing the right things there – but there is a national element to this which cannot be ignored and which requires the government to recognize and also acknowledge this and make the appropriate changes to the system to allow for this.

More than five years ago, the Royal Borough had a DSG deficit of £752,000, where it has now reached millions.

Cllr Carroll said the deficit had grown over the past two years as the pandemic was ‘crippling’, forcing the board to spend more money on special measures to keep schools running.

He also said that 28 of the 38 schools maintained in the Royal Borough are not in deficit while the other ten are “marginally” in deficit or seriously.