Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, with reference to the report by the East of England APPG and EELGA entitled Levelling Up in the East of England - the Region’s Progress towards the Government’s Twelve Levelling Up Missions, what assessment she has made of the potential implications for her policies of the recommendation in that report for a review of the funding formula that applies to rural schools.

The Department recognises the essential role that rural schools play in their communities. The National Funding Formula accounts for the particular challenges faced by small schools in rural areas through the lump sum and sparsity factor.

In recent years, the Department has made changes to the sparsity factor that have seen the total amount it allocates increase from £26 million in the 2020/21 financial year to £95 million in 2022/23. It will increase again to £97 million in 2023/24.

From 2022/23, the Department began measuring schools’ remoteness more accurately, by road distances, and this led to a significant increase in the number of schools eligible for sparsity funding to over 2,500 schools in total.