Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what estimate his Department has made of the total amount of funding schools will have pay to supply agencies to bring retired and ex-teachers back to teaching to cover for covid-19-absences in (a) January, (b) February and (c) March 2022.

Schools have continued to receive their budgets in full throughout the COVID-19 outbreak regardless of periods of full or partial closure.

In addition, the department has re-introduced the COVID-19 workforce fund to provide financial support to eligible schools and colleges for additional staff absence costs incurred from 22 November until the February spring half term in 2022. The fund is available to support schools and colleges facing the greatest staffing and funding pressures to continue to deliver face-to-face, high quality education to all pupils.

School funding remains one of the department’s key priorities, which is why this government continues to deliver year on year, real terms per pupil increases to school funding with the total core school budget increasing to £56.8 billion by 2024-25.

In 2022-23 alone core schools funding will increase by £4 billion compared to 2021-22, a 5% real terms per pupil boost. This will help schools rise to the challenges of COVID-19, increase teacher pay, and meet the cost of the Health and Social Care Levy, while continuing their work to raise attainment.

Local authority and school expenditure is published annually, with the latest available data being the 2020-21 financial year, and is available here: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/la-and-school-expenditure.

Please note that this publication does not include academies.

School level data (including academies) is available at the schools financial benchmarking website, with the latest available data being the 2020-21 financial year for local authority maintained schools and the 2019/20 academic year for academies (to be updated to the 2020/21 academic year in spring 2022): https://schools-financial-benchmarking.service.gov.uk/Help/DataSources.