Stephen Timms – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Education

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Stephen Timms on 2016-04-19.

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, whether she plans for local authorities to continue to receive basic need allocations of capital for new school places under her proposals for all schools to become academies.

Edward Timpson

Local authorities will continue to be responsible for ensuring there are enough school places to meet demand and supporting them to do this will remain one of the government’s top priorities for this Parliament. That is why we allocate funding to local authorities based on their own estimates of the number of places they will need and will continue to do so. We have committed to spending £7 billion on school places up to 2021 which, along with our investment in the free schools programme, we expect to deliver 600,000 new places.

Local authorities have always relied on their strong relationships with local schools to deliver the places needed and this will not change as more schools convert to become academies.