Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what estimate his Department has made of the number of special schools that have (a) closed or (b) reduced their opening hours as a result of covid-19 cases in each of the last 12 months.

The department publishes data on state-funded special schools that have closed for COVID-19 since the start of the academic year. This can be found on Explore Education Statistics. The lowest geographical level the data is split to is local authority level.

The most recent published data at national level is 6 January 2022. For regional and local authority level data, the latest published data is 16 December 2021. The most recent national, regional and local authority data can be found through this link:
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/attendance-in-education-and-early-years-settings-during-the-coronavirus-covid-19-pandemic-23-march-2020-to-6-january-2022.

The published data on state-funded special schools that have closed for COVID-19 within the last 12 months can be found in Table 1B:
https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/data-catalogue/attendance-in-education-and-early-years-settings-during-the-coronavirus-covid-19-outbreak/2022-week-2.