Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, how many new school places his Department estimates will be created by all centrally funded school places programmes in the (a) 2018-19, (b) 2019-20 and (c) 2020-21 academic years.

The Government has committed £7 billion of funding for school places between 2015 and 2021, on top of investment in the free schools programme. The Government is on track to deliver an additional one million school places this decade, the largest increase in school capacity for at least two generations.

The Department collects pupil forecasts, existing school capacities, and plans to deliver additional school places from each local authority via the annual school capacity survey. This is combined with information on centrally funded projects to add places, such as new free schools.

The latest available estimates on the number of new school places created by centrally funded school places programme are 23,817 places in 2018/19, 23,775 places in 2019/20, and 20,447 places in 2020/21. School capacity statistics publications are available here:

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/school-capacity-academic-year-2016-to-2017.

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/school-capacity-academic-year-2017-to-2018.