Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps she is taking to improve school infrastructure in (a) South Staffordshire constituency, (b) Staffordshire and (c) the West Midlands.

Well maintained, safe school buildings are a priority for the Department.

The Department has allocated over £13 billion to improve the condition of school buildings since 2015, including £1.8 billion committed for the current 2022/23 financial year.

The Department recently announced that eligible schools will also receive an allocation from an additional £447 million in capital funding in 2022/23 for capital improvements to buildings and facilities, prioritising works to improve energy efficiency. This includes £709,572 for schools in South Staffordshire constituency, £7,266,813 for schools in the Staffordshire Local Authority and £49,563,732 for schools in the West Midlands.

Condition allocations are published online at: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/school-capital-funding. As the funding of many of these allocations is determined at a local level, and because many responsible bodies, such as large academy trusts, cut across local boundaries, it is not possible to break the total spend down to constituency or Local Authority level.

In addition, the School Rebuilding Programme (SRP) will carry out major rebuilding and refurbishment projects at 500 schools across England, with buildings prioritised based on their condition. There are now 400 projects in the programme, with the most recent set of 239 schools announced in December 2022. Confirmed projects can be found at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/school-rebuilding-programme.

In total, fifty schools in the West Midlands have been provisionally selected for SRP to date. Of these, four are within Staffordshire, two of which are within the South Staffordshire constituency. These are Brindley Heath Junior School Academy and Wombourne High School.

Seven schools within Staffordshire Local Authority were part of the Priority School Building Programme (PSPB), two of which are still in progress.