Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, if he will make an estimate of the (a) number and (b) surface area of solar panels installed on (a) academy, (b) maintained and (c) other schools in England as on 20 September 2022; and if he will make an assessment of the adequacy of his Department's collection of that information.

The number of solar panels, recorded by surveyors as photovoltaic (PV) panels, in schools in England was collected as part of the Condition Data Programme (CDC) which ran from 2017 to 2019. It was recorded that there were 175,634 solar panels in academy schools (representing 1,929 schools), 116,015 in maintained schools (representing 2,046 schools), and 4,504 in other schools (representing 37 schools). The Department is refreshing the data through the successor CDC2 programme. The data will be ready to share once the programme has concluded.

The Department does not collect data on the surface area of solar panels.

For CDC we collected data on solar panels for 64,000 school blocks or 99.8% of the school estate in England. This data gives us a clear picture of the extent of installation of solar panels on school buildings in the school estate in England. The data:

• is collected from a visual, non-intrusive survey of schools in England
• represents data collected from 2017 to2019 and does not incorporate subsequent changes
• includes solar panels attached to school buildings and will exclude any solar panels located elsewhere on the school site.