Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what recent assessment her Department has made of the impact of inflation on (a) school budgets and (b) the cost to parents associated with the school day.

Schools will receive an additional £2 billion in each of 2023/24 and 2024/25 academic years as a result of the 2022 Autumn Statement. The core schools budget, which covers schools’ day-to-day running costs, including schools’ energy bills and the costs of providing income-related free school meals, has risen from £49.8 billion in 2021/22 to £53.8 billion in 2022/23 and will continue to rise to £57.3 billion in 2023/24 and £58.8 billion in 2024/25. By 2024/25, funding per pupil will have risen to its highest ever level in real terms. These increases provide support to schools to deal with the effects of inflation on their budgets.

In September 2022, the Government announced unprecedented support to protect households and businesses from high energy prices. The Energy Price Guarantee and the Energy Bill Discount Scheme, the successor to the Energy Bill Relief Scheme, are supporting millions of households and businesses.

The Department is clear that school uniforms should be affordable. No school uniform should be so expensive that pupils or their families feel unable to apply to or attend a school of their choice. In November 2021, the Department issued statutory guidance on the cost of school uniforms to ensure the cost of school uniforms is reasonable. The guidance is available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/cost-of-school-uniforms/cost-of-school-uniforms. Governing boards should be compliant with much of the guidance by September 2022 and fully compliant by summer 2023.

The Government has announced further support, worth £26 billion, for next year. This is designed to target the most vulnerable households and families. This is on top of the £37 billion cost of living support provided by the Government this year.