Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment she has made of the effect of the decision to end the Building Schools for the Future programme on the number of available school places.

Building Schools for the Future was cancelled in July 2010. Rather than providing new school places, the programme’s main aim was to rebuild or refurbish all secondary and special schools in England by 2020.

Supporting local authorities to create sufficient school places is one of the Government’s top priorities and we fund all school places needed based on local authorities’ own forecasts. We are spending £7 billion to create new school places between 2015 and 2021, which, along with our investment in the free schools programme, we expect to provide 600,000 new places, including 270,000 in free schools. The latest data shows that nearly 735,000 additional pupil places were created between May 2010 and May 2016 with many more delivered since then and in the pipeline.

On top of this, our current school rebuilding programme, the Priority School Building Programme, is meeting the condition need at 537 schools across the country. It has reduced timescales to start building works by up to two years and is delivering projects for a third cheaper than Building Schools for the Future.