Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps his Department is taking to ensure that benchmarking data is promptly available to schools so that they can report their spend to governors using such data in line with his Department's guidance.

Benchmarking data for local authority maintained schools, relating to the 2016-17 financial year, will be published on the Schools Financial Benchmarking tool later this month available at: https://schools-financial-benchmarking.service.gov.uk/. Benchmarking data for academies and academy trusts for the 2016/17 academy financial year will be published in the summer term.

The department has made improvements to the data collection and internal publication processes that will improve the timeliness of updates to the Schools Financial Benchmarking tool in the future. These improvements include online data collections, streamlined validation and automated data uploads.