Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, whether she has made a recent assessment of the financial impact of contracts with Transform Schools (Stoke) Limited on existing school budgets.

The Stoke Local Authority school private finance initiative (PFI) contract was signed in the year 2000 and covers 88 schools in the area. The contracts were commonplace from 1998 to 2009. The department recognises that some schools with PFI contracts face higher costs.

The department supports schools that have unavoidable extra costs related to their PFI contracts through the ‘PFI factor’ in the schools national funding formula.

Local authorities determine individual schools’ final funding allocations through their own local formula. Local authorities can choose if, and how, to operate a PFI factor in their local funding formula. How they do this will vary between local authorities, reflecting in each case the specific nature of the PFI contract in question.

The purpose of the factor is to fund the additional costs to a school of being in a PFI contract, but not necessarily the full cost, as some costs may be covered within other factors and are not unique to PFI schools.

In 2024/25, the department is allocating £3.1 million in funding through the PFI factors for schools in Stoke.