Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, when the process for bids to the Northern Powerhouse Education Fund (a) opened and (b) closed; what the remit of the Northern Powerhouse Education Fund is; what the bidding process was for that Fund; how many applications to that Fund were received; and which of those applications were successful.

As part of the 2016 Northern Powerhouse Schools Strategy, the government committed £70 million to support educational improvement in the north, up to the end of March 2020. Since that announcement, the government has spent or committed significantly more than £70 million to support educational improvement in the north. This includes spending in key areas identified in Sir Nick Weller’s report, including measures in the north to improve teaching and leadership capacity; recruit and retain teachers; and close the disadvantage gap. In 2017, nearly 400,000 more children were in good or outstanding schools in the north compared to 2010.

As detailed in the response to Question 140739, funding was distributed in a number of ways. A series of bidding rounds were conducted for the Strategy School Improvement Fund and the Teaching and Leadership Innovation Fund. The northern elements of these and other national funds and iniatives were set out in the earlier answer, and details of the application process and the dates of the bidding rounds for those funds were detailed on GOV.UK at the following links:

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/strategic-school-improvement-fund.

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/teaching-and-leadership-innovation-fund.

In other cases, we either allocated funding directly to new initiatives for the north of England; or allocated additional funding to existing initiatives, to boost their impact in the north.