Dorset County Council is set to reshuffle the cash it gives to schools after finding itself near the bottom of the Government's funding table.

The county discovered at the end of last year that it was to receive the lowest Government funding in the country for the next financial year.

So in a bid to make funding fairer to schools across the county the cash strapped council has worked out a new formula for funding which will share more evenly the money they already have, taking into account how much is needed by each child and how much the county can afford to give.

A Dorset County Council spokesperson said: "While no schools are overfunded, at the moment some schools in the county receive more money than others.

"Since the schools started managing their own finances 10 years ago the funding formula has always been worked out in the same way and schools have been asking us to look at changing that.

"We've broken down what each child needs and how much that will cost so we can evenly share out the money and at the same time we'll be taking out parts of the old system which no longer fit.

"We can't make huge changes all at once by taking money from one school and giving it to another but at least we now know where we had been going wrong and how to change it.

"It's a step forward in the transparency of the system and in the argument for fairer funding."

Dorset County Council lobbied the Government for a fairer funding formula as part of f40, a group made up of the 40 worst funded local authorities.

But the county dropped from 32nd place to 34th in the funding table after being awarded an increase of just 3.9 per cent compared with the national and regional average of 5.8 per cent, leaving a £21.3 million shortfall in funding.

The spokesperson added: "We have been campaigning to the Government for a long time for fairer funding for Dorset but we didn't get it, instead we received less than we usually would so now we don't have enough money to provide what our pupils need by a long way.

"We could ask the Government for more money but we're unlikely to get it, so instead we are redistributing what we do have to make it fairer."