Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, if she will make an assessment of the impact of population growth on the adequacy of school capital funding in Mid Bedfordshire constituency.

The statutory duty to provide sufficient school places sits with local authorities. The department provides capital funding through the Basic Need grant to support local authorities to provide school places.

Basic Need funding allocations are based on the number of additional mainstream places needed in Reception to Year 11, which the department calculates using local authorities’ own pupil forecasts and data on existing school capacity. The department funds local authorities to provide at least a 2 per cent operating margin of places, to help support parental choice, churn in the pupil population, and the general manageability of the system. The funding rate per place each local authority receives is adjusted to reflect inflation and the different cost of construction in regions across the country.

The department has announced Central Bedfordshire will receive a total of just under £36.1 million to support the provision of new school places needed between May 2022 and September 2026, paid across the five financial years from 2021/22 to 2025/26. This takes their total funding allocated between 2011 and 2026 to just under £121.3 million.

Developer contributions are also an important way of helping to meet demand for new school places when housing developments are driving pupil numbers. It is for Central Bedfordshire Council, as the Local Planning Authority, to secure developer contributions through section 106 agreements or the Community Infrastructure Levy, and to decide on the local infrastructure needs that this contribution should support.