Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, how much her Department has spent on agency workers in each of the last five years.

The Department has no data that defines Agency Workers for the last 5 years.

However, the Department’s published data contains information on the total spent on non-payroll Contingent Labour staff (i.e., Agency Staff (Clerical and Admin); Interim Managers; and Specialist Contractors) in the Department for Education and its Executive Agencies.

https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/dfe-monthly-workforce-management-information

We do also publish the value of Contingent Labour in the Departments Annual Reports.

https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/dfe-annual-reports

In the last 4 years of Annual Reports our Contingent Labour costs were:

2011-12 - £1.67m

2012-13 - £25.76m

2013-14 - £30.4m

2014-15 - £14.5m

2015-16 - £15.8m

We are yet to publish this year’s Contingent Labour costs in our Annual Report, however the figure of £15.8m was already collated and released for a different unrelated PQ no. 39467.