Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, whether funding allocations through the National Funding Formula will allow headteachers to maintain levels of teaching assistant support.

The overall core schools budget is increasing by £3.7 billion in the 2025/26 financial year, meaning that it will total £65.3 billion, compared to £61.6 billion in the 2024/25 financial year. This is a 6% overall increase, which against the backdrop of a challenging fiscal picture, demonstrates the government’s commitment to enabling every child to achieve and thrive through delivery of the Opportunity Mission.

This total includes part of the additional funding announced on 22 May to support schools with the cost of staff pay in the 2025/26 financial year, including for the 3.2% local government pay offer in respect of support staff.

Headteachers are ultimately responsible for employment of teaching assistants in their schools, as they are best placed to understand the specific needs of their pupils and make staffing decisions accordingly. To help them to do so, 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 model.