Asked by: Karl McCartney (Conservative - Lincoln)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what modelling her Department has undertaken on the demand for school places in each year from 2016 to 2030.
Answered by Edward Timpson
Supporting local authorities in their responsibility to ensure sufficient school places remains one of this Government’s top priorities. Pupil forecasts based on ONS population projections, which include migration, have been published up to 2024.
Local authorities are responsible for ensuring that there are sufficient school places to meet that need, and for determining precisely how many new places are needed in their area. We allocate funding for new school places to local authorities based on their own projections of local pupil numbers. These projections reflect all drivers of increased pupil numbers: rising birth rates, housing development and migration from within the UK and overseas. Any increase in need for places should be reflected in the local authority’s final basic need allocation – there is no shortfall between the number of places we fund and the number of places local authorities say they will need to create.
We have already committed to invest £7 billion on school places, which along with our investment in 500 new free schools we expect to deliver 600,000 new places by 2021. We have also protected the schools budget so that as pupil numbers increase, so will the amount of money in our schools. Revenue allocations to local authorities are calculated by reference to pupil numbers and do not differentiate on the basis of immigration from other EEA member states or countries from outside the EEA.