Jess Phillips – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Education

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Jess Phillips on 2016-10-11.

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, if she will estimate the cost to the public purse of the Educational Excellence Everywhere White Paper consultation document.

Caroline Dinenage

The white paper set out our plans to deliver Educational Excellence Everywhere: so that every child and young person would be able to access world class provision, achieving to the best of his or her ability regardless of location, prior attainment and background.

The white paper built on previous reforms which continue the historic devolution of power from local and central government to the best school leaders, providing not just autonomy, but also the support where it is needed to enable the school-led system to spread excellence across the country. The white paper proposed far reaching structural reform of our education system and many of the reforms and policies contained were funded by existing budgets announced in the 2015 Spending Review. For this reason my department has not separately made an estimate of the overall cost of the white paper.

Alongside the publication of the White Paper, Budget 2016[1] announced funding for a number of the policies set out in the document, in particular an additional £640million across the Spending Review period, on top of the Department’s Spending Review settlement, to pay for school reform.

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/budget-2016-documents

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