Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what estimate her Department has made of the proportion of the cost of the increase in employers National Insurance contributions that will be met by (a) additional support from her Department and (b) schools in (i) Essex and (ii) England.

The government has agreed that public sector employers will receive support in recognition of the increase in their National Insurance contributions (NICs) from April 2025.

Schools have autonomy over their budgets in order to respond to the needs of their pupils. The NICs grant announced on 18 March was designed to distribute funding in a way that is close to how core funding for schools is allocated through the national funding formula, introduced under the last government. A long-standing principle of the funding system is that it is designed to distribute funding according to pupil need and not to match the precise spending of each individual institution, as their spending patterns, including NICs costs, will vary.

The department is providing schools and high needs settings with over £930 million in the 2025/26 financial year to support them with their increased NICs costs. This support is additional to the £2.3 billion increase to core school funding announced at the Autumn Budget 2024. This means that the core schools budget, which includes the core revenue funding for schools and high needs, will total over £64.8 billion in 2025/26.

The amount of public sector support for NICs is based on HM Treasury analysis of the proportion of employer NICs receipts paid by public sector organisations and allocated between departments based on headcount and wage/salary data.

The department has distributed this funding in proportion to the need of the different sectors and phases of education at a national level for England. The department will continue to monitor cost pressures, as it usually does. The department’s most recent assessment, which included consideration of the impact of the change in NICs, was published in the ‘Schools’ Costs’ technical note on 18 March 2025 and can be accessed here: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/67d974935bad4b1a7f01ed62/Schools_costs_technical_note_2024_to_2026.pdf.

We have published a calculator tool for mainstream schools and academies to estimate their NICs grant funding for the 2025/26 financial year, with allocations being published shortly.