Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps her Department is taking to reduce differences in urban and rural school funding.

The government is committed to a national funding formula that will deliver fairness to all parts of the country – rural and urban, north and south.

In the first stage of our consultation, we proposed including a sparsity factor which would help rural schools, as well as a lump sum factor which would help small schools everywhere.

We will both respond to the first consultation and launch the second stage consultation later in the autumn.