Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what recent estimate her Department has made of the effect on further education colleges of increased student enrolments not being fully funded until the following financial year.

Institutions receive funding for all their students on a lagged approach, meaning the funding in each academic year is based on the number of students in the previous year. This allows the department to issue firm allocations to institutions well in advance of the start of each academic year. This also gives further education colleges and other institutions the confidence to make financial plans for the forthcoming year knowing that, if for some reason their student numbers fall, they will have time to adjust plans before funding reflects that in the following academic year.

We recognise that where an institution makes a particularly significant expansion in student numbers in a single year, cost pressures can arise. For that reason, we provide Exceptional In-Year Growth funding for institutions that grow student numbers above a certain level. We are investing £87 million to fund exceptional in-year growth for the 2025/26 academic year.