Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, how much his Department has spent from the public purse on the purchase and development of land and buildings for academies and free schools to date.

The Government has committed to invest more than £23 billion in the school estate between 2016-17 and 2020-21. This includes a combination of formula and bid-based allocations to schools, local authorities and academy trusts and centrally delivered programmes.

The Government’s free school programme was introduced in 2010 and is currently the only programme responsible for both purchasing and developing land and buildings for schools. As of 1 March 2018, there are 391 open free schools, 35 studio schools and 49 university technical colleges (UTCs), which will provide over 256,000 places when at capacity.

The Department’s total capital costs for free schools, UTCs and studio schools in each financial year since the inception of the programme, are provided in the table below.

¹ Rounded to the nearest £1 million.

² This figure will be available in July of this year once the department lays the Education and Skills Funding Agency’s annual accounts before Parliament.

A detailed assessment of the capital budget required for each free school project is carried out both before site purchases and again before construction contracts are signed. All variations to the capital budget are reviewed and approved through an established and audited capital approval process and significant variations are escalated to Ministers, the Education and Skills Funding Agency Accounting Officer and, if required, HM Treasury.

Capital funding for individual free schools, UTCs and studio schools, where costs have been finalised and are no longer commercially sensitive, are published on GOV.UK at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/capital-funding-for-open-free-schools.

Data publications for our other main capital funding programmes can be found at the following links:

Schools Condition Allocations and Devolved Formula Capital: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/capital-allocations.

The Priority Schools Building Programme: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/priority-school-building-programme-psbp.

Basic Need:https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/basic-need-allocations.