Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, if he will publish a geographical breakdown by (a) local authority and (b) parliamentary constituency of his Department's statistics published on 17 February 2022 on delivery of air cleaning units to education settings.

To fulfil all eligible applications, up to 9,000 air cleaning units will be provided to state-funded education providers for poorly ventilated teaching spaces where quick fixes to improve ventilation are not possible. As of 24 January 2022, 1,265 providers were eligible to receive air cleaning units. These were allocated to providers based on need, using the eligibility criteria we have set out in our guidance.

As of 11 February, 6,311 air cleaning units have been delivered to state-funded education providers. A breakdown of this data by local authority is available in the attached table. We do not hold this data by parliamentary constituency.

Natural ventilation is best where that is achievable, and we have robust evidence that in the vast majority of cases, teaching spaces and classrooms benefit from sufficient natural ventilation. That evidence includes the responses to our recent survey of providers using the carbon dioxide monitors that we published on 24 January. This showed that only 3% of providers reported sustained high CO2 readings (above 1,500ppm) that could not be remedied through quick fixes or remedial building works. The survey findings are available here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/co2-monitor-survey-and-applications-for-air-cleaning-units.