Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, how much funding from the public purse has been allocated to schools in England per pupil in real terms in (a) 1990, (b) 2000 and (c) 2017.

School funding per pupil in cash terms was £2,938 per pupil in 2000-01 and £4,618 per pupil in 2017-18. The Government publishes GDP deflators that can be used to understand the impact of inflation over time. These are available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/gdp-deflators-at-market-prices-and-money-gdp-march-2017-spring-budget-2017.

These figures are not directly comparable as the figure for 2000-01 also includes funding provided for early years.

In 1990 school funding was included within the local government funding settlement. For this reason, the funding information for 1990 is not readily available. Analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies has shown that per pupil spending in schools in 2020 is set to be at least 70 per cent higher in real terms than it was in 1990:

https://www.ifs.org.uk/publications/8937.