Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what the evidential basis is for her assessment that schools can make efficiency savings within budgets without reducing headcount.

Overall school funding is increasing by £3.7 billion in the 2025/26 financial year, meaning the core school budget will total £65.3 billion. This is a 6% rise in cash terms, or a 3.3% increase in real terms, compared to 2024/25. We are providing schools with an additional £615 million in the 2025/26 financial year to support them with the 4% teacher pay award and 3.2% support staff pay offer.

Schools will be expected play their part in driving productivity across the public sector and find approximately the first 1% of pay awards by ensuring resources are deployed to maximise support for teaching and learning.

There is already evidence that schools are making savings and bringing down operating costs. For example, 400 schools participating in the department’s new energy offer are projected to save an average of 36% compared to previous contracts.

We are also working to secure better banking solutions and provide services such as Get Help Buying for Schools and the Teaching Vacancies Service to reduce procurement and recruitment costs. This support has evolved from the School Resource Management Programme, which helped schools realise £1 billion of savings between 2018 and 2022.

We know workforce deployment is the biggest component of school budgets. We will support schools to benefit fully from the tools we already offer to benchmark and integrate resourcing and curriculum planning, such as the Financial Benchmarking and Insights Tool. We will also introduce a new toolkit to support schools to adopt evidence-based deployment models.