Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, how much Official Development Assistance his Department was allocated in the financial years (a) 2019-20 and (b) 2020-21; and what estimate his Department has made of the amount of Official Development Assistance his Department will be allocated for the financial year 2021-22.

The Department for Education’s estimates of spending on Official Development Assistance (ODA) primarily relate to the provision of education to child and unaccompanied child asylum seekers in the 12 months after they make an asylum claim in the UK. The Department does not have a separate funding stream for educating asylum seeker children and is not allocated an ODA budget. Instead, to calculate ODA spending we estimate how much of the wider core schools funding for England is allocated due to having these children on schools’ rolls.

The Department’s estimated spending on ODA in each calendar year from 2015 to 2019 is given below:

The level of spending in future years will be dependent on the number of asylum seeker children that arrive in the country.