Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what estimate her Department has made of the number of children in England who were not allocated a place at their preferred (a) primary and (b) secondary school due to pressures linked to a rising population in each of the last three years.

The Department publishes school application and offer data annually and this is available here: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/statistics-school-applications.

Supporting local authorities to create sufficient school places is one of the Government’s top priorities. That is why we have committed to investing £7 billion in new school places up to 2021, which, when added to our investment in the free schools programme, will help to create 600,000 new places.