Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what support her Department is providing to the local council in Torbay to improve the supply and quality of local school places.

Local authorities are responsible for planning and securing sufficient school places in their area, and supporting them in doing so is one of this government’s top priorities.

Basic need funding is allocated to local authorities to support them in their work creating new school places. We use data provided by authorities to ensure funding is targeted according to levels of need in each area. Torbay has received £6 million of basic need funding for 2011-15, helping to create 147 new school places by the end of the academic year 2014-15, with many more in the pipeline. The 2015-18 basic need funding allocation for Torbay is £10 million.

The previous government published the first primary basic need scorecards to hold local authorities to account for the quality of the places they create. Torbay’s scorecard showed that as of summer 2013, 94% of primary places were created in ‘good’ or ‘outstanding’ schools.