In a letter to former Children's Secretary Ed Balls, Education Secretary Michael Gove stated that £359m in savings will come from "cutting waste, and stopping and scaling back lower-priority spending". A further £311m will come from reducing area-based grants to local authorities.
Cost savings include cutting the final round of youth sector development fund grants, which will save £8m, and scaling back the safeguarding budget also by £8m by delivering child internet safety messages more efficiently and reducing spending on the home safety scheme.
A further £5m will be saved by scaling back planned expenditure on play. The single largest saving will be made by not spending the unallocated £47m earmarked for one-to-one tuition.
Plans to extend free school meals to further primary school pupils and run additional pilot schemes have also been scrapped.
In the letter, Gove said that the cuts identified mean that "local authorities should be able to achieve the necessary savings through efficiencies across their budgets rather than cuts to frontline services".
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