Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment he has made of the adequacy of the availability of primary school places in (a) Woking constituency and (b) Surrey.

Local authorities are under a statutory duty to ensure that there is a school place available for every child. The Department provides basic need funding for every place that is needed, based on local authorities’ data on pupil forecasts. Surrey has been allocated £287.4 million to provide new school places from 2011-21.

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. Information from local authorities, together with information on centrally funded projects to add places, such as new free schools, is used to produce estimates of the future need for school places.

The Department only collects data at local authority and planning area level, and so does not hold data at constituency level. The latest available modelled estimates for Surrey show that there will be a net surplus of 4,633 primary places in the current academic year. This is forecast to increase to a net surplus of 5,963 primary places by 2022-23. The latest published data also shows that 14,658 new primary places have been created in Surrey between 2010 and 2018.