Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, whether he plans to award grants from the Coronavirus (COVID-19) fund to (a) St Luke's Halsall primary school in Crosby and (b) schools in Sefton.

The first window for submitting claims for exceptional costs related to the COVID-19 closed on 21 July. At that time, St Luke’s, Halsall had submitted a claim which included £1,651 for costs within the published scope of the funding and £6,025 for costs outside of that published scope. A payment for the in-scope costs of £1,651 was due to be made to the local authority at the end of October 2020 to be passed onto the school in line with the usual practice. The assessment process to determine which types of out-of-scope costs will be included is ongoing and we intend to write out to schools by the end of November to confirm the outcome of this part of their claim.

This applies to all schools who made a claim against this funding. The attached table includes the details of the in-scope and out-of-scope claims made by schools in the Sefton local authority area.