Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, how many school places have been available in (a) Batley and Spen constituency, (b) Kirklees and (c) England in each of the last seven years.

Local authorities are responsible for ensuring there are sufficient school places for pupils. The Department collects pupil number forecasts and school capacity data from each local authority through the annual school capacity survey (SCAP). This data is used to allocate capital funding to local authorities to help them provide sufficient school places where they are needed. The Department’s Pupil Place Planning team then work with the Local Authorities to determine those places that are in fact being created.

The capacity and forecasts data are published on an annual basis, giving local authority and regional totals, through the SCAP tables which can be found at https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/statistics-school-capacity. School capacity and forecast data is not available at constituency level.

The following table provides the requested information on available school places (school capacity) in Kirklees and England in each year from 2009/10 to 2015/16.

Table 1: School capacity in state funded primary and secondary schools

School capacities are as reported by local authorities for all school types, based on their knowledge of each school.