Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, how many school playing fields have been converted under section 77 of the School Standards and Framework Act 1998 in each of the last 10 years.

Both changing the use of playing field land and disposals of playing field land require the Secretary of State’s consent for local authority owned land under section 77 of School Standards and Framework Act 1998 (“SSFA”).

The majority of change of use cases involve building on existing playing field land in order to build new or expand existing classrooms, either permanently or temporarily, to accommodate pupil numbers. Whilst this will change the area into non-playing field land, it remains educational land.

The Department has a clear policy presumption against the loss of publicly funded school land, particularly in the case of playing field land. Applicants are required to provide evidence that alternative proposals have been considered and consent is normally only given where an applicant provides sufficient sports and/or recreational mitigations to compensate for the loss of existing playing field and the department is satisfied that the benefits of the proposed change of use outweigh the loss of playing field land.

Whilst the Department has recorded information on change of use applications on its central database since 2017, this information is used for internal case management purposes only and does not reflect the total number of cases.

Regarding disposals of playing field land, since May 2010 the Department has published on GOV.UK details of disposals of publicly funded playing field land which can be found at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/school-land-decisions-about-disposals. The list will be updated shortly to include new playing field disposals since the last update in July 2020.