Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, if she will amend her Department's definition of sparsity in school funding criteria to specify that a school less than three miles from another school is not classed as a rural school.

The Government is committed to supporting small and remote schools which, due to their location, do not necessarily have the same opportunities to work as efficiently as other schools. 63% of respondents to our stage 1 schools national funding formula (NFF) consultation agreed with our proposal to include a ‘sparsity’ factor to target additional funding to schools that are small and remote. The Government’s response to the first stage NFF consultation is available here: https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/schools-national-funding-formula.

We are now consulting on proposals for the amount of sparsity funding that eligible schools should receive. Under our proposals, small and remote schools would receive £27 million of funding through the sparsity factor, and 676 schools that do not currently receive any sparsity funding from their local authority would start to receive this funding. The second stage consultation runs until 22 March 2017 and the documentation can be found at: https://consult.education.gov.uk/funding-policy-unit/schools-national-funding-formula2/.

We will make final decisions on the national funding formula following the conclusion of the consultation.