Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment her Department has made of the effectiveness of the Teachers' pay grant.

The Department provided £1.5 billion per year to schools and Local Authorities through the Teachers’ Pension Employer Contribution Grant (TPECG) and supplementary fund to cover the cost of the increase in the employer contribution rate of the Teachers’ Pension Scheme (TPS) from 16.4% to 23.6% from September 2019. The Department also provided approximately £500 million per year through the Teachers’ Pay Grant (TPG) to support schools to implement the 2018 and 2019 teachers’ pay awards.

Since 2021/22, the majority of this funding has been paid through the schools, high needs and central school services block (CSSB) National Funding Formulae (NFF), instead of as separate grants. Including this in the NFF simplified the allocation of this funding, worth almost £2 billion a year, improving the efficiency of the funding system, and providing schools and Local Authorities with greater certainty that this funding would continue to be considered part of their core funding.

In early years, the funding previously distributed through the teachers’ pay and pensions grants has been rolled into the entitlements funding for 3 and 4-year-olds from 2023/24 and distributed through the Early Years National Funding Formula and Maintained Nursery School supplementary funding.

School and academy sixth forms and 16 to 19 schools are not funded through an NFF. In the 2023/24 financial year, these institutions will continue to receive the TPECG, paid separately to core allocations. The TPG was rolled into core 16 to 19 funding from the 2022/23 academic year.

No specific evaluation of either of these grants has been commissioned or is planned, as the grants were provided as a contribution to schools’ overall funding. The aim of the grants was to provide additional funding to cover the costs of the increase in the employer contribution rate of the TPS, and the teachers’ pay awards in 2018 and 2019, before the funding could be rolled into core allocations.

More information on how the TPG grant has been calculated and rolled in can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/teachers-pay-grant-methodology/teachers-pay-grant-methodology#paying-the-grant. Details on the TPS are available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/teachers-pension-employer-contribution-grant-tpecg/pension-grant-methodology#how-we-calculate-allocations.