Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps her Department is taking to improve the quality of school buildings in Southport.

The Department has allocated over £13 billion for improving the condition of school buildings since 2015, including £1.8 billion committed for the current financial year. The Department is also delivering the School Rebuilding Programme to rebuild or significantly refurbish buildings at 500 schools in the poorest condition.

There are now 400 projects in the rebuilding programme, with the most recent set of 239 schools announced in December 2022, including Greenbank High School in Southport. Confirmed projects can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/school-rebuilding-programme.

For the 2022/23 financial year, Sefton Local Authority, which covers Southport constituency, received an annual School Condition Allocation (SCA) of £2,426,424 to spend on improving the condition of its maintained schools. Large multi -academy trusts and voluntary-aided school bodies, such as dioceses, also receive SCA. As SCA is allocated to responsible bodies, not individual schools, it is not possible to provide a constituency level breakdown of this funding. Allocations are published here: https://view.officeapps.live.com/op/view.aspx?src=https%3A%2F%2Fassets.publishing.service.gov.uk%2Fgovernment%2Fuploads%2Fsystem%2Fuploads%2Fattachment_data%2Ffile%2F1074690%2FSchool_capital_funding_allocations_for_2022_to_2023.ods&wdOrigin=BROWSELINK.

Schools not part of bodies eligible for SCA are instead eligible to bid to the Condition Improvement Fund (CIF) each year. In the 2022/23 CIF round, there were five successful CIF applications across three schools in Southport. CIF funding is released in phased payments as work progresses.

The Department recently announced that eligible schools will also receive an allocation from an additional £447 million in capital funding in 2022/23 for capital improvements to buildings and facilities, prioritising works to improve energy efficiency. This includes £588,635 for schools in the Southport constituency.